At the Existentialist Café

Praise

“We’re in the middle of a boom in serious popularizing books that try to bring us closer to the classics by anchoring them in the lives of their creators, books like Stephen Greenblatt’s Will In The World, which explores how young Shakespeare made himself into Will Shakespeare, and Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Cafe, which grounds the work of Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir and others in their gaudy personal experience.” —NPR’S FRESH AIR  
 
“At the Existentialist Café is a tale told in a personal, engaging way, with frank opinions on the readability of the texts concerned. It weaves together philosophy with biography and historical context (cafés, jazz and zazous, the smuggling of unpublished papers from occupied territories), and follows How to Live in its attractive use of illustrations amongst the text.” —LA TERRASSE
 
“Writing about that many huge thinkers in that huge of a world event would seem to make for an epic huge serious tome. But Bakewell handles everything—the development in thinking, the feuds, the historical context—smoothly and gracefully and with good humor, with no sense of drudge-y academic philosophy-talk. Reading At The Existentialist Café is like sitting down with her at the Existentialist Café, as friends, and she’s pointing over at the table with all the eccentrics shouting over each other and she’s giving you the scoop, the skinny, the gossip, because she’s hung out with them, sat at the table. You want to sit at the table with her. Even just to listen.” —ENTROPY MAGAZINE

“[a]n erudite page-turner… Bakewell’s book brought to life, warts and all, the characters who shaped the new philosophy of existentialism, a way of thinking about everyday life that aims at describing human experience as fully and vividly as possible. Narrating the story of existentialism in its historical context and in richly evocative detail, Bakewell charted the intellectual and personal encounters among the ever-evolving, frequently fractious circle of philosophers and social critics centered around Sartre and de Beauvoir.” —LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS