The Plague, the Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

The Plague - written in 1947 and still relevant - is a tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The Fall (1956), which takes the form of an astonishing confession by a French lawyer in a seedy Amsterdam bar, is a haunting parable of modern conscience in the face of evil. The six stories of Exile and the Kingdom (1957) represent Camus at the height of his narrative powers, masterfully depicting his characters - from a renegade missionary to an adulterous wife - at decisive moments of revelation. Set beside their fictional counterparts, Camus's famous essays "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "Reflections of the Guillotine" are all the more powerful and philosophically daring, confirming his towering place in twentieth-century thought.

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.