The perfect introduction to Proust — the spellbinding opening section of Swann’s Way, the first book of his epic seven-volume In Search of Lost Time. The title “Overture” was the invention of its first English translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff: not found in Proust’s French, but somehow apt. Like a musical overture, these seventy or so pages are at once self-contained and anticipatory: a piece of writing that stands alone, while introducing, in miniature, the themes and characters that will dominate the vast work to come. The novel’s great obsessions — time, desire, childhood, and a past that comes alive in the senses — are not merely announced but enacted; culminating in the most famous conjunction of cake and tea in twentieth-century fiction.

The launch of this PDR Press Mini marks the first time that Proust’s “Overture” has been published in a standalone edition, one small enough to slip into a pocket. Presented here in Scott Moncrieff’s original English translation: a rendering of unmatched music and wit, and the voice through which generations of readers first fell in love with Proust.