With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward. Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. “The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.” –from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.
