The Book to Come
Once again, Amazon is stirring hope where none should exist. The last collection of Maurice Blanchot�s essays to be translated into English, The Book to Come, is due from Stanford University Press this month, according, that is, to my “dealer”. It quotes the blurb:
“During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot. The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise; 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 constitute a veritable repertoire: Rousseau, Proust, Artaud, Brach [do they mean Broch?], Musil, James, Beckett, Bataille, Mallarme, Joubert, and Claudel, among others.”
But a better source, Charlotte Mandell, the heroic translator, (who responded kindly to my Spike effort to introduce the author) tells me it is out early next year. Indeed, the SUP site has no information on it. (By the way, to Amazon’s credit, the Benjamin book arrived on time and is already tucked beside volumes one and two, ready for the desert island).
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- The Book Now Come
- Colloquy on Blanchot
- Emergence from silence
- The Librarie The Librarie, as it calls itself, …
- Val�ry’s Notebooks
