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The Complete Notebooks
Brief Description
The first complete translation of Albert Camus's personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, including new material never before published in English. Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks that offers an unrivalled glimpse into the writer at his...
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The Complete Notebooks
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Description
The first complete translation of Albert Camus's personal notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, including new material never before published in English.
Throughout his career, French writer and philosopher Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks that offers an unrivalled glimpse into the writer at his most personal and reflective. These notebooks contain his thoughts on politics, solitude, personal failings and regrets, his travels, and his relationships with friends and rivals. They also provide insight into his process as a thinkerβhis frustrations, his ideas for novels and plays (some pursued and others abandoned), his routines, his aspirations, and his self-recriminations.
For Camus devotees, there is no more intimate experience than reading these notebooks. On the one hand, his fallibility is on full display: He is irritated by mediocrity, frustrated with his health, plagued by insomnia, and miserable about life's petty necessities. Yet, he is also intensely curious and observant, sometimes moved to rapture by landscapes and people. Readers will experience the bounty of Camus's philosophical imagination and will witness firsthand how his ideas take shape. The notebooks contain drafts of letters to friends and recorded reflections on the compromises that being in the world demands.
This publication marks the first time Camus's complete notebooks have been published in one comprehensive volume. Expertly and movingly translated by Ryan Bloom with extensive footnotes contextualising the entries, The Complete Notebooks will remain a literary treasure for years to come.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780226694818
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 11 December 2025
Country: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Illustration: 3 line drawings
Contributors:
- Translated by Ryan Bloom
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 51.0mm
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 1080g
Pages: 648
About the Author
Albert Camus (1913β60) was a French philosopher, writer, and journalist and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century letters. His widely read and translated works include the novels The Stranger, The Plague, and The FallΒ and the philosophical texts The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Ryan Bloom is a literary translator, fiction writer, and essayist from Washington, DC. His translations of Camusβs work include Caligula and Three Other Plays; Travels in the Americas; The First Man: The Graphic Novel; and Notebooks 1951β1959. He is a 2024β2025 Guggenheim Fellow and a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University.
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