Thomas L'Obscur (Nouvel Version)

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.