Blanchot Reader: Essays and Fiction Book

Fiction/Literary Criticism, translated from the French by Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton, with a foreward by Christopher Fynsk and an afterword by George Quasha and Charles Stein, edited by George Quasha. Maurice Blanchot, in his "rcits" and essays alike, attends to "the haunting presence of a language that brings language itself into question as it searches the borders of what can be said in its time." (from the Foreword) Resolutely exploratory, refusing the modes of explanation and lyric complacency, and resolutely astute, letting no one, least of all the writer, off the hook of fiercely committed language in a difficult world, Blanchot's writing is, in Susan Sontag's phrase, "unimpeachably major." "Blanchot's power as a writer pierces, like a look that is too direct, the indeterminate prose, and makes all relations, and especially our relation to time, absolutely precarious." (-Geoffrey Hartman) This book is the only collection in English of Blanchot's mature fiction, and includes, as well as a reprint of seven of Blanchot's Station Hill books, a selection of literary/philosophical writings drawn from five of his most important works.Read More