I Want To Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole

"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.

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.

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

Winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize, this first volume of the author's autobiography provides a searching portrait of his personal background and creative development. Elias Canetti was one of the major intellectual figures and polymaths of the twentieth century. A master of many genres, he is known especially for his novel, Auto-da-Fe, and his great work of social theory, Crowds and Power. But Canetti's genius is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the three volumes of his autobiography. This first volume, Tongue Set Free, provides a searching portrait of the author's personal background and creative development as it presents the events, personalities (especially Canetti's mother), and intellectual forces that shaped the growth of the artist as a young man.

A compelling account of the development of a great artist, and a portrait of the tragic character of an entire era The uncompromising achievement of Elias Canetti has been matched by few writers this century. Canetti worked brilliantly in many forms, but the three volumes that comprise his autobiography are where his genius is perhaps most evident. The first volume, The Tongue Set Free, presents the events, personalities, and intellectual forces that fed Canetti's early creative development. The Torch in My Ear explores his admiration for the first great mentor of his adulthood, Karl Krauss, and also describes his first marriage. The final volume, The Play of the Eyes, is set in Vienna between 1931 and 1937, with the European catastrophe imminent; here he vividly portrays relationships with Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, among others.

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.

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