The Stranger, also published in English as The Outsider, is a novella by French author Albert Camus.The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French settler in Algeria described as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture." He kills an Arab man in French Algiers, who was involved in a conflict with one of Meursault's neighbors. Meursault is tried and senten...

Albert Camus's The Stranger is a spare, unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, following Meursault, an emotionally detached French Algerian whose mother's death, casual relationships, and senseless act of violence expose the fragile conventions by which society judges meaning and guilt. Written in lucid, restrained prose, the novel exemplifies Camus's philosophy of the absurd: the clash between humanity's hunger for order and an indifferent universe. Its cool surface, colonia...

A collection of Valéry’s shorter prose writingsThis book brings together smaller volumes and booklets in which Paul Valéry published selections of his shorter prose writings: aphorisms, moral reflections, poetic observations, flashes of wit or fancy, even jokes—a variety of remarks and impressions, many of them first recorded in his Notebooks.The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, the first collected edition of the writer in English, features new tran...