Susan Taubes

This essential work collects Susan Taubes's philosophical and critical writings, establishing her as one of the most remarkable philosophical minds of the 20th century. At the centerpiece of the volume is Susan Taubes's dissertation on Simone Weil, "The Absent God", and also included are her previously published essays and reviews on Weil, Heidegger, Jean Genet and Albert Camus, as well as an unpublished fragment on Franz Kafka. Taken together, these rigorously philosophical works show Taubes to be a thinker preoccupied with seeking out a lexicon – of myth and symbol, image and narrative – by which to articulate the conundrum of how to live and die in a cosmos saturated with meaning but devoid of divinity. There has been a surge of interest in Taubes following the recent republication of her novels Divorcing and Lament for Julia. With an incisive introduction by Sarah Hammerschlag, this volume provides the necessary supplement to her fictional corpus, tracking Taubes's transformation from philosopher to novelist, while revealing Taubes to be not only an extraordinary literary voice but a profound scholarly one as well.

This essential work collects Susan Taubes's philosophical and critical writings, establishing her as one of the most remarkable philosophical minds of the 20th century. At the centerpiece of the volume is Susan Taubes's dissertation on Simone Weil, "The Absent God", and also included are her previously published essays and reviews on Weil, Heidegger, Jean Genet and Albert Camus, as well as an unpublished fragment on Franz Kafka. Taken together, these rigorously philosophical works show Taubes to be a thinker preoccupied with seeking out a lexicon – of myth and symbol, image and narrative – by which to articulate the conundrum of how to live and die in a cosmos saturated with meaning but devoid of divinity. There has been a surge of interest in Taubes following the recent republication of her novels Divorcing and Lament for Julia. With an incisive introduction by Sarah Hammerschlag, this volume provides the necessary supplement to her fictional corpus, tracking Taubes's transformation from philosopher to novelist, while revealing Taubes to be not only an extraordinary literary voice but a profound scholarly one as well.

Sofi mertva; ona drejfuet v fantasmagoricheskom limbe vospominanij, vymyslov i snov. Ej mnogoe nado uspet. Dobratsja v grobu iz Parizha v Nju-Jork, chtoby popast na svoi pokhorony. Dobitsja razvoda ot Ezry Blajnda - blestjaschego uchenogo, ravvina, obajatelnogo manipuljatora, chej egoizm po razrushitelnoj sile sravnim lish s ego libido. Dopisat knigu o svoej seme i privesti v porjadok otnoshenija s roditeljami, kotorye razvelis davnym-davno, do vojny, do poezdov smerti, esche kogda zhili v Budapeshte, otkladyvaja neizbezhnuju immigratsiju. I nakonets - ponjat, kto takaja Sofi Blajnd bez muzha i akademicheskoj karery, ottsovskogo psikhoanaliza i evrejskikh obrjadov vengerskoj rodni. Sofi esche nikogda ne chuvstvovala sebja takoj svobodnoj i zhivoj. Sjuzen Taubes (1928-1969) - vengero-amerikanskaja pisatelnitsa, filosof, religioved. Ee eksperimentalnaja proza, do nedavnikh por predannaja zabveniju, byla vysoko otsenena Semjuelom Bekketom i Sjuzen Sontag. "Razvod" - ispovedalnyj, edkij roman o paralizujuschej mizoginii i prizrakakh Kholokosta - ostalsja edinstvennoj ee knigoj, izdannoj pri zhizni. Cherez nedelju posle publikatsii pisatelnitsa utopilas v Atlanticheskom okeane. Vstupitelnaja statja Oksany Vasjakinoj. Khudozhnitsa oblozhki Anna Samojlova. Perevodchik: Julija Poleschuk

A celestial overseer observes--and is continually confounded by--a young woman's path into adulthood in this uncanny and darkly humorous novel, unpublished until now and accompanied by a selection of the author's stories. Susan Taubes's novella "Lament for Julia" is the story of a young woman coming of age in the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a sexless spirit who supposes himself to be charged with her oversight. What is this spirit? An operator from on high (though hardly holy), a narrative I, and a guiding presence that is more than a bit of a voyeur, who remains entirely unknown to Julia herself. About her, the spirit knows both a good deal and very little, since Julia's emotional and physical and sexual being are all baffling, if also fascinating, to an entity that is pure mind. The I and Julia are a mismatched couple, set up for failure from the start, it seems, even if they do somehow manage to deal in their different ways with childhood and Mother and Father Klopps and ugly pink outfits and dances and crushes for a while. After which come love and marriage, not necessarily in that order, at which point things really start to go wrong. Unpublished during Taubes's lifetime, "Lament for Julia" appears here with a selection of her stories. A brilliant metaphorical exploration of a woman's double consciousness that is also a masterpiece of the grotesque, it is a novel like no other, a book, as Samuel Beckett wrote to his French publisher, "full of erotic touches of an emphatic sort and] raw language," the product of an "authentic talent," adding, "I shall reread it."

A stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the 20th century, now back in print for the first time since 1969. Dream and reality overlap in Divorcing, a book in which divorcing is not just a matter of marital collapse but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie's childhood in pre-World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions of her life now. The question that haunts Divorcing, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life. Susan Taubes's startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored; after the author's tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to rediscover a dazzlingly intense and inventive writer whose work in many ways anticipates the fragmentary, glancing, lyrical novels that Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick would write in the 1970s.