The Book to Come

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects French Stuff Literary Studies Literary Studies MOSTLY Theory

by Maurice Blanchot,

Translated by Charlotte Mandell

Stanford University Press

Due/Published January 2003, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0804742243

The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française; almost all of them appear in English for the first time. Not a random collection of essays, this book is organized into four sections: "the secret of literature"; literature as exigence and as meaning; literature and the novel; and the future of writing and of the book. The authors discussed include: Rousseau, Proust, Artaud, Brach, Musil, James, Beckett, Bataille, Mallarmé, Joubert, and Claudel, among others.

Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

"Maurice Blanchot was without doubt one of the greatest Western critics of the twentieth century, and his work was essential for the development of a wide range of contemporary and subsequent critics of widely different allegiances. I read most of these essays as they came out in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise and reading them again I am struck once more by their brilliance simply as literary criticism, by their indefatigable focus on the question of the nature of writing, and by the wide range of modern authors they discuss from Blanchot's special perspective."--J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine