Pela primeira vez, num único volume, toda a fcção curta de Marcel Proust. Proust deixou uma produção marcada pela sua extensa obra «Em Busca doi Tempo Perdido» mas Proust não é só a sua imensa obra ficcional, contos espalhados por diversas colecções de textos diversos («Os Prazeres e os dias» ou ainda «Pastiches et mélanges»), contos e histórias de juventude e ainda os famosos contos perdidos como «O Indiferente» que se julgaram perdidos durante boa parte do século XX. «O Indiferente» é mesmo um dos melhores exemplos da importância da ficção curta de Proust: enviado para uma revista literária que abre falência antes da publicação do conto, foi considerado perdido pelo autor e pelo mundo até ao final dos anos 70, altura em que é redescoberto. Para surpresa dos especialistas, nas cerca de 20 páginas do conto estão patentes e condensados os grandes temas e questões levantados posteriormente em «... Tempo Perdido». Cerca de 1/3 dos textos que compõem esta edição são traduzidos pela primeira vez em língua portuguesa.
Author
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51. Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
