From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. They display Camus at the height of his powers.

Now, on the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, Carol Cosman's new translation recovers a literary treasure for our time.

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.