"The time has come to attend to Blanchot's early literary and political journalism (his missteps included) which, surprisingly, the first generation of his postwar admirers barely noted. It reminds us that this major theoretician of literary modernity has never been associated with academia: the newspaper was the site of his first critical exercise. Death Now provides a rich overview of the French literary atmosphere during the fateful final period of the Occupation. It is also unmistakably haunted by the ghost of a Blanchot to come."-Denis Hollier, New York University
By 1944, the days of Germany's domination of Europe are numbered, and defeat seems no more than a matter of time. In occupied France, there is renewed activity on the political and the cultural fronts, in anticipation of the liberation that now appears inevitable. Already the author of two novels and a volume of criticism, Maurice Blanchot is henceforth fully established as a major figure in what will soon be post-war France.
Blanchot's position in this new order is problematical, however. Despite having discreetly supported the Resistance, he makes clear that his only true allegiance is to literature. Against the tide of his own emerging reputation, he is increasingly drawn to silence as the only valid response to what the world has become. For him, ruin cannot be reconstructed with the aid of literature, because ruin is the mode in which literature most authentically exists and with which the world has only now caught up.
This grim and potentially nihilistic message seems to make Blanchot into little more than an anachronism in the emerging post-war world. Yet his attitude is the very opposite of aloofness. Silence becomes for him an intense search for a language commensurate with "circumstances that literature can still neither express directly nor distort". Beyond this volume, which completes the English publication of his wartime literary journalism, his writing over the next fifty years will patiently establish a margin in which new forms thought will offer themselves to a new age.
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003)-writer, critic, and journalist-was one of the most important voices in twentieth-century literature and thought.
Michael Holland is a Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford.

Introduction by Michael Holland 1
The Mystery of Criticism 11
Return to the Source 16
From One Novel to Another 21
The Four Gospels 27
From Jean- Paul to Giraudoux 31
A Diary without Episodes 36
On the Subject of Language 40
The Romance of Mademoiselle Aïssé 45
The Joy of Storytelling 49
Outlawed Idols 53
The Art of André Dhôtel 58
Balzac's Way of Working 63
The Gothic Novel 68
The Secrets of the Dream 73
A Novel by Jarry 78
Novellas and Stories 84
Chateaubriand's Secret 88
Fantastic Novels 93
Air and Dreams 97
Joyce's First Novel 102
A Secret Tone 107
The Literary I 112
Charles Cros 117
The Birth of Rome 122
William Blake 127
On the Various Ways of Dying 132
Pages by Paul Claudel 137
Narratives 142
Léon Bloy 147
Poems 153
The Concern for Sincerity 160
No Man's Son 165
The Magical Experience of Henri Michaux 169
A Chronology of the "Chronicles of Intellectual Life"
Collected in Faux pas 175
Notes 179
Index 195