The Temptation to Exist

“A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning”—The Washington Post

This collection of eleven essays, when originally published in France, created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers.

The Temptation to Exist first introduced this brilliant European thinker twenty years ago to American readers, ...