Albert Camus, The Stranger

For our first meeting of 2026, we will discuss Albert Camus' classic "absurdist" novel The Stranger. Originally published in 1942, Camus' first published novel remains his most famous and popular work by far.

For our discussion, we will be meeting at the Bayou Heights Biergarten and sitting inside (upstairs above the beer taproom). Below is a link to the reading followed by a brief description of the work:

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"With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. The Stranger is a strikingly modern text, and Camus’s stoical anti-hero and ­devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.

Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed 'the nakedness of man faced with the absurd' and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.

Considered a classic of twentieth-century literature, The Stranger has received critical acclaim for Camus's philosophical outlook, absurdism, syntactic structure, and existentialism (despite Camus's rejection of the label), particularly within its final chapter. Le Monde ranked The Stranger as number one on its 100 Books of the 20th Century."