1. It’s time for the second entry in our Summer Reading series! Today, our VP, Executive Editor Joan Bingham is recommending CAMUS, A ROMANCE by Elizabeth Hawes! And we’ll be giving away 5 copies of the book to all you Camus-lovers out there. Go to our FB page to enter: http://www.facebook.com/groveatlantic.  And, now, Joan Bingham, on her pick: A few summers ago, after I published CAMUS, A ROMANCE by Elizabeth Hawes, I was in Provence, and with some friends went in search of Camus’ grave in Lourmarin. He had won the Noble Prize in 1957 and with the money bought a house in a hot, arid place where the landscape and light reminded him of Algeria. He had hoped this mother would settle there. She did manage to visit, but for a former char woman partially deaf and almost mute, she ultimately felt only at home in Algiers in her old Arab neighborhood. The grave stone was plain, stark, made of local limestone and engraved with deep simple capital letters : Albert Camus – 1913 1960. We were overwhelmed by this simple, lonely grave, so eerily powerful. When Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of forty-six, he was mourned around the world. The author of such works as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Rebel, he inspired uncommon devotion in his readers, yet remained an elusive figure. CAMUS, A ROMANCE reveals the man behind the famous name: the French-Algerian of humble birth and Mediterranean passions; the TB-stricken exile who edited the World War II resistance newspaper Combat; the moralist whose split with Jean-Paul Sartre made literary history; the pied-noir in anguish over the Algerian War; the Don Juan who loved a multitude of women; and the writer always in search of a truer voice. Hawes follows in his footsteps, visiting North Africa, Paris, New York, and Provence, meeting his friends and family, trying to know Camus, to enter his solitude. It is a unique literary feat, at once biography and memoir.

    It’s time for the second entry in our Summer Reading series! Today, our VP, Executive Editor Joan Bingham is recommending CAMUS, A ROMANCE by Elizabeth Hawes! And we’ll be giving away 5 copies of the book to all you Camus-lovers out there. Go to our FB page to enter: http://www.facebook.com/groveatlantic.  And, now, Joan Bingham, on her pick:

    A few summers ago, after I published CAMUS, A ROMANCE by Elizabeth Hawes, I was in Provence, and with some friends went in search of Camus’ grave in Lourmarin. He had won the Noble Prize in 1957 and with the money bought a house in a hot, arid place where the landscape and light reminded him of Algeria. He had hoped this mother would settle there. She did manage to visit, but for a former char woman partially deaf and almost mute, she ultimately felt only at home in Algiers in her old Arab neighborhood.

    The grave stone was plain, stark, made of local limestone and engraved with deep simple capital letters : Albert Camus – 1913 1960. We were overwhelmed by this simple, lonely grave, so eerily powerful.

    When Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of forty-six, he was mourned around the world. The author of such works as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Rebel, he inspired uncommon devotion in his readers, yet remained an elusive figure. CAMUS, A ROMANCE reveals the man behind the famous name: the French-Algerian of humble birth and Mediterranean passions; the TB-stricken exile who edited the World War II resistance newspaper Combat; the moralist whose split with Jean-Paul Sartre made literary history; the pied-noir in anguish over the Algerian War; the Don Juan who loved a multitude of women; and the writer always in search of a truer voice.

    Hawes follows in his footsteps, visiting North Africa, Paris, New York, and Provence, meeting his friends and family, trying to know Camus, to enter his solitude. It is a unique literary feat, at once biography and memoir.