Shortlisted for the MSA Translation Book Prize 2024One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts ofMarcel Proust’sIn Search of Lost Timeput an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisherBernard de Falloisclaimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in theProustmanuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden amongFallois’sprivate papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018.The Seventy-Five Folios & Other Unpublished Manuscriptspresents these folios here for the first time inEnglish, along with 17 other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary & notes by the Proust scholarNathalie Mauriac Dyeroffer insightful critical analysis.Characterized byFalloisas the “precious guide” to understanding Proust’s masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of 6 episodes included in the novel. Readers glimpse whatProust’sbiographerJean-Yves Tadiédescribes as the “sacred moment” when the great work burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical extent ofProust’swriting, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence ofCharles Swann, for example, we find a narrator namedMarcel, a testament to what one scholar has called “the gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction inProust’selaboration of the novel.”Like a painter’s sketches & a composer’s holographs,Proust’sfolios tell a story of artistic evolution. A “dream of a book, a book of a dream,”Falloiscalled them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.