Last Times

Praise

“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