At the Existentialist Café
Subtitle: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Publisher: Knopf Canada; Vintage Canada
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 448
ISBN-13: 9780345810939
Subjects: Philosophy, modern, 20th century; Philosophers, biography; Philosophers, france; Existentialism
Description: <i>At the Existentialist Café</i> is a thrilling look at the famous group of post-war thinkers who became known as the Existentialists: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, and their circle. Starting with Paris after the devastation of the Second World War, Sarah Bakewell (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for her previous book) takes us inside the passionate debates and equally passionate lives of these brilliant, if flawed, characters. Here is a wonderful, vibrant look at the social, artistic and political currents that shaped the existentialist movement—a mode of thinking and being that, as Bakewell vividly shows, deeply affects us today.

Never has the story of this influential group, and especially that of the legendary relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir, been told with such verve and sweep, weaving personal life with social upheaval and the universal quest for understanding.