"A brilliant selection . . . Canetti's range astonishes." —Claire Messud, Harper's A career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen. He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison, he never killed anyone. He neither won nor lost a fortune. All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought. Here, in his own words, is one of the twentieth century’s foremost chroniclers: a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably peripatetic writer named Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is a summa of Canetti’s life and thought, and the definitive introduction to a writer whose genius for interpreting world-historical changes was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an abiding skepticism about the knowability of the self. Born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti later lived in Austria, England, and Switzerland while traversing, in writing, the great thematic provinces of his time: politics, identity, mortality, and more. Sourced from Canetti’s landmark texts, including Crowds and Power, an analysis of authoritarianism and mobs; Auto-da-Fé, a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel about the fate of European literature; the famous sequence of sensory-titled memoirs, including The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear; and never-before-translated writings such as the posthumous The Book Against Death, this collection assembles its luminous shards into the fullest portrait yet of Canetti’s remarkable achievement. Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen (Book of Numbers, The Netanyahus), I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole leads us from Canetti’s polyglot childhood to his mature preoccupations, and his friendships and rivalries with Hermann Broch, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and others. This collection is also interspersed with aphorisms and diary entries, revealing Canetti’s formal range and stylistic versatility in flashes of erudition and introspective humor. Throughout, we come to see Canetti’s restless fascination with the instability of identity as one of the keys to his thought—as he reminds us, It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.

Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations presents brief aphorisms selected from the German Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's writings. These short writings collected in this bilingual edition offer remarkable insight into the life and thinking of "one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius" (Iris Murdoch).

The Play of the Eyes is the third volume in Nobel Prize winning author Elias Canetti's trilogy of memoirs. Here, Canetti describes his young adult life as he tries to make it as a writer in Vienna during the 1930s, and provides vivid accounts of the remarkable figures he meets along the way, usually in cafes, from Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, and Herman Broch, among others. "Canetti uses a dramatist's gifts here to achieve emotional depth; his mother's death, sketched simply against the backdrop of a crumbling Europe, takes on a tragic dignity." - Publishers Weekly

How do crowds work? What is the nature of their unique creation - the demagogue? This is the renowned and original analysis of one of the 20th century's most threatening and influential phenomena by the Nobel Prize-winning thinker Elias Canetti.

NOTES FROM HAMPSTEAD is a map of the late Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti's thinking. Canetti draws on the troubled period following the death of his wife and the publication of his masterwork of social theory, CROWDS AND POWER. Wide-ranging in form and content, the book is suffused with Canetti's uncommon intelligence, his rage at the defects of the spirit, and an unquenchable thirst for elusive truths.

In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett." The more common comparison is to "a comic Kafka." Both formulations effectively describe the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the presence of a mind-bending genius, but one characterized by a wry, buoyant voice, as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing. Walser is one of the twentieth century's great modern masters—revered by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebald—and Selected Stories gives the fullest display of his talent. "He is most at home in the mode of short fiction," according to J. M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books. The stories "show him at his dazzling best."

Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti's sensational memoir: a frank, acerbic, and cranky way his years of British exile.