Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot
created the "new novel, " the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written
between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly
translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of
his famous and perplexing invention, "the ontological narrative"--a tale
whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work
discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of
mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this
endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities
of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this
re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.