New York, NY: Vintage (2007)

New in paperback.

From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them.

A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man’s perpetual search for an inner kingdom in which to be reborn. They display Camus at the height of his powers.

Now, on the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, Carol Cosman’s new translation recovers a literary treasure for our time.

Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger—now one of the most widely read novels of this century—in 1942. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.