Last Times

“Serge is also the laureate of the light in the dark, a writer sensitive to flashes of beauty… . [E]verything that glows is precious to Victor Serge, is a source of wonder, a glimmer of possibility beyond the catastrophe of the present.” —Ben Lerner, The New York Review of Books“Serge knows how class and patriotism cut across one another in complex ways…“—Sean Sheehan, The Prisma“To read Last Times is to watch an accelerating catastrophe. Watch is the operative word. Serge’s novel suggests a treatment for a social disaster movie. Written in the midst of World War II, it spans a bit more than a year, from the capture of Paris in June 1940 to the German invasion of the Soviet Union the following June, and often evokes a three-hour film epic with an all-star international cast.” —J. Hoberman, New York Times Book Review “In what is (no mean feat) perhaps his bleakest novel, Serge holds a mirror up to French society, and Western democracies in general.” —Marcus Hijkoop, LARB “[Victor Serge’s] work has always been a testament to the spirit of liberty, to the individual’s stubborn endurance against the tyrannical systems that seek to crush them. Serge could have easily been lost to history, but his unwillingness to go quietly has left us with a body of work that makes him impossible to forget, and because of this, he has indeed survived.” —Jared Marcel Pollen, LARB

Victor Serge (1890-1947) was a revolutionary Marxist and a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Among his works available in English are the novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Unforgiving Years, Conquered City, and Midnight in the Century; an autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary; and a collection of journal entries, Notebooks- 1936-1947.

Ralph Manheim (1907-1992) was the translator of more than one hundred books. After Manheim’s death, the PEN Medal for Translation, which he won in 1988, was renamed in his memory.

Richard Greeman has translated and written the introductions for five of Victor Serge’s novels. He splits his time between Montpellier, France, and New York City.

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