Kate Briggs’s wonderful translation finally makes available in English a most unusual book by one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. Although the three lecture series were posthumously published in French in the order they were given, Columbia University Press have brought out the final course before the first one (How To Live Together, their translation of the second appeared in 2005) – an indication of just how intriguing a book this is.
