"Perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, Albert Camus (1913-1960), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is more relevant today than ever before. Personal Writing brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope of his personal preoccupations. Featuring a foreword by acclaimed Camus scholar Alice Kaplan (author of Looking for the Stranger), this volume...

The Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri was one of the most remarkable of the many remarkable Jesuits who made the perilous journey to Buddhist lands. The present volume provides an introduction to his encounter with Buddhist philosophy, describing his efforts to save the souls of the people of Tibet. In 1721, as he waited in Tibet for a letter from Rome that would grant him papal permission to remain in Tibet and carry out his mission to convert its...

You're front-row center to murder as a homicidal maniac stalks the snowbound guests of an imposing manor ... as a group of strangers gather on an isolated island -- to the diabolical delight of a secret killer ... as a scheming wife takes the stand against her husband in a startling criminal trial. From The Mousetrap (the longest-running play in history) to Ten Little Indians and Witness for the Prosecution (both made into classic film thrillers),...

"The debut short novels--nearly thirty years out of print-- by the internationally acclaimed writer, newly retranslated and in one English-language volume for the first time, with a new introduction by the author. These first major works of fiction by Haruki Murakami center on two young men--an unnamed narrator and his friend and former roommate, the Rat. Powerful, at times surreal, stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism, these novellas bear...

"Benjamin Fondane--who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges's friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz--was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, "a torture and a spur." Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming...

"The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC) has long been read as a wise and pragmatic guide to living a good life. Writing at the very moment when Rome was transitioning from a republic to an empire, Romans found the advice in his poems appealing: live quietly and non-extravagantly amid the excesses of a materialistic society, avoid extreme emotions of any kind as psychologically damaging, place a value on friendship of all kinds, do not be afraid of death,...

"In this pair of novellas and two stories, Russo's characters bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from most of his novels. In "Horseman," a tenured professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches--"And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention," a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward, or...

When C.H. Sisson was 20, he gave up writing poems. He began once more in his thirties under the stress of war, stationed in India. He is one of the few direct English heirs of the Modernists, his work grounded in the English landscapes.