Marcel Proust

Within a Budding Grove received the Prix Goncourt when it was published in 1919 and catapulted its author to overnight fame. It takes the autobiographical narrator of Swann's Way from childhood through adolescence. He loses interest in Gilberte and falls in love with Albertine, the dark girl on her bicycle, with 'that little beauty spot on her cheek, just under the eye.' Albertine, her friends, and the fictional Normandy resort of Balbec...

'The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most memorably in...

"The Guermantes way" is the path that runs past the chateau belonging to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. It also represents the path into "the social kaleidoscope" traveled by Proust's narrator, which culminates in his introduction to the Paris salon of the Guermantes. The rich cast of characters in this third volume of In Search of Lost Time includes Robert de Saint-Loup, who is obsessed with the prostitute Rachel, and Baron...

Carol Clark's acclaimed translation of The Prisoner introduces a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. The fifth volume in Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time--the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s--brings us a more comic and lucid prose than readers of English have previously been able to enjoy. The titular "prisoner" is Albertine, the tall, dark...

"The seventy-five folios and other unpublished manuscripts contains early versions of six episodes later included in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Discovered in 2018 and presented here for the first time in English, the folios reveal the autobiographical extent of Proust's work and the "sacred moment" when his genius blossomed"--

The narrator interrupts reminiscences about his childhood spent in late-nineteenth-century France to recall the affair which a friend of the family carries on with young Odette de Crecy.