This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: 'A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II, ' is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. 'Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism, ' writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, ' and John Updike in The New Yorker: 'Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit.'