Books Palace

A person can read a collection of books, or inherit a library and read its contents. But reading an entire publishing house along with some publications from other houses is only possible for someone who has lived nearly a century. The author of this book, Roger Grenier, was born in 1917 and died in 2017, and worked for more than half a century in management at one of the largest publishing houses in the world, the famous Gallimard. His book, "The Palace of Books," is the result of diverse readings accompanied by important notes on books that the publishing house asked him to review, reflecting his stance on many literary, philosophical, and artistic issues, which he discusses in an engaging and enjoyable style. The Palace of Books reveals the author's keen insight, which takes the breadth of his knowledge, abundant information, and ease of presentation, to take us on an enjoyable journey from Marcel Proust to Albert Camus, from Baudelaire to Virginia Woolf, from Boccaccio through Samuel Beckett and Maurice Blanchot, not forgetting Flaubert, Gilles Deleuze, George Sand, and dozens of others. Through them, we explore how to read books and why we read them. It is an enjoyable blend of autobiography and literary and artistic critique that the author tries to evoke in us enthusiasm for books.