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Alexandre Dumas was a French playwright, historian and prolific novelist, penning a string of successful books including The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), and Twenty Years After(1845). His novels have been translated into a hundred different languages and inspired over two hundred films. In his day Dumas was as famous for his financial irresponsibility and flamboyant lifestyle as for his writing. Dumas died in 1870. Former Contributing Editor at Granta Books, Will Hobson is a critic and translator from the French and German, whose translations include Viramma: A Pariah's Life, Viramma (Verso); The Battle, Patrick Rambaud (Picador); Sans Moi, Marie Desplechin (Granta); Benares, Barlen Pyamootoo (Canongate); and The Dead Man in the Bunker, Martin Pollack (Faber) and Marilyn's Last Sessions by Michel Schneider (Canongate). His translation on Being Arab by Samir Kassir (Verso) won the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award 2007. He writes for the Independent on Sunday, the Observer and Granta magazine, and translated Greenpeace's presentation to the Pope before the Kyoto Summit into Latin.
Massive, funny, moving, exhaustingly gripping: a melodrama, a revenge drama and, literally, bodice-ripping * Independent on Sunday * There was nobody quicker than Dumas. There were few better. Dumas stands proudly in the pantheon of 19th-century greats. He deserves to be regarded alongside Dickens and Tolstoy as an influential, enduring writer * Glasgow Herald * Dumas's novels are shameless word-guzzlers, big and plush and almost sinfully comfortable... If Dumas was a hack, he was a hack with genius. His storytelling never seems the least bit mechanical: no assembly line, then or now, could ever turn out a narrative as joyful, as eccentric, as maddeningly human as The Three Musketeers * New York Times * [Dumas's books] are fast-moving page-turners; vivid, bombastic and irresistible, with their unforgettable characters and flamboyant splatter of French history * Irish Times * The most popular man of the century... More than French...European; more than European...universal
