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-Fe, 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 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.

In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that 'by definition, [he] could never live to complete', as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti’s aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death – published in English for the first time since his death in 1994 – interposed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate is a reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicization, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one’s own death, while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Infused with fervour and vitality, The Book Against Death ultimately forms a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.

"Auto-da-Fe," Elias Canetti's only work of fiction, is a staggering achievement that puts him squarely in the ranks of major European writers such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. It is the story of Peter Kien, a scholarly recluse who lives among and for his great library. The destruction of Kien through the instrument of the illiterate, brutish housekeeper he marries constitutes the plot of the book. The best writers of our time have been concerned with the horror of the modern world--one thinks of Kafka, to whom Canetti has often been compared. But "Auto-de-Fe" stands as a completely original, unforgettable treatment of the modern predicament.

"Crowds and Power" is a revolutionary work in which Elias Canetti finds a new way of looking at human history and psychology. Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.

Nobel Prize-winning author Canetti spent only a few weeks in Marrakesh, but it was a visit that would remain with him for the rest of his life. In The Voices of Marrakesh, he captures the essence of that place: the crowds, the smells - of spices, camels and the souks - and, most importantly to Canetti, the sounds of the city, from the cries of the blind beggars and the children's call for alms to the unearthly silence on the still roofs above the hordes. In these immaculately crafted essays, Canetti examines the emotions Marrakesh stirred within him and the people who affected him for ever.

Writing about Elias Canetti, Susan Sontag remarked that "the notebook is the perfect literary form for the eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is 'everything.'" Notes from Hampstead confirms this. It is a map of the late Nobel laureate's thinking, a triumphant compendium of aphoristic, enigmatic, and expository writings covering a characteristically diverse range of subjects: the significance of mythology and ethnicity, the nature of creativity, the extraordinary hold violence has on the twentieth century, literary history (we learn of his affection for Cervantes, Stendhal, and Gogol, and of his adoration of Kafka), and, always, there is a violent quarrel with death.

Canetti draws on the troubled period following the death of his wife and the publication of his masterwork of social theory, Crowds and Power. An ambivalent interest in spiritualism also characterizes the collection: Canetti's conversations with Jesuits and Indian gurus and his readings of Greek, Hebrew, and primitive myths give a kaleidoscopic view of the uses and abuses of religions. 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 The Torch in My Ear Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner, towering intellectual figure and polymath, gives us his second volume of autobiography. Using as a framework his admiration for his first great mentor, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus, and his passion for his first wife, Veza, Canetti seamlessly incorporates a profoundly perceptive portrait of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. Here are the voices of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. This is autobiography redefining itself.

The literature of the Wiener Moderne exhibits biting social satire and other related aspects, first emanating from Karl Kraus (1874-1936), a prolific writer, difficult to classify, who reminds people of Jonathan Swift. Novelists and essayists Hermann Broch (1886-1951) and Elias Canetti (1905-94), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, were likewise marginalized, to a large extent as Jews. Robert Walser (1878-1956) is Swiss, and to a large extent like the other three authors in this collection, had no less a desire to upset the social applecart. Among the works included are substantive selection from Krauss's "The Last Days of Mankind and Aphorisms", Bloch's "The Anarchist," selections from Canetti's "Crowds and Power and Auto-da-Fe", and Walser's "Jakob von Gunten".

From one of the preeminent intellectual figures of the twentieth century, a highly personal testimonial of what Canetti himself chooses to term "notations," bits and pieces: notes, aphorisms, fragments. Taken together, they present an awesomely tender, guiltily gloomy meditation on death and aging.

A stunning and unexpected new volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography. A surprise gift to celebrate the Nobel Laureate's 100th birthday. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, at 85, beset by the desire to come to terms with his years of exile in Britain, wrote Party in the Blitz. He waited half a century to confront these memories, perhaps because "in order to be truthful, I should have to track down every needless humiliation I was offered in England, and relive it as the torture it was." Party in the Blitz dissects that torture with unrestrained acerbity, recounting the ordeal of being in a new country where not a soul knew his writing. But not one to be ignored, "the godmonster of Hempstead" (as John Bayley dubbed Canetti) soon knew everyone and everyone knew him. Enoch Powell, Bertrand Russell, Iris Murdoch, Empson, Wittgenstein, Kokoshka, Kathleen Raine, Henry Moore, Ralph Vaughn Williams: Canetti knew them all, and in Party in the Blitz he mercilessly rakes some of them over the coals. He detested T.S. Eliot and came to bitterly despise Iris Murdoch, with whom he had an affair: Every word of his devastating portrait of her quivers with rage. "He must have been a frequent party-goer," as Jeremy Adler remarks in his excellent afterword, "to judge by the well-informed distaste with which he recalls them." Gorgeously translated by Michael Hofmann, Party in the Blitz lives up to Canetti's injunction that "when you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about."

"The Torch in My Ear "is the account of Canetti's young manhood, of his arrival in Vienna in the early 1920s, of his schooling, and of the beginning of his life as a writer.

In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancee Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently fallen in love. Broken and bereft, Kafka - at the height of his writing powers - turned the experience into his masterpiece, The Trial, where his lovers became the faceless prosecutors of Josef K. In Kafka's Other Trial, Canetti explores each letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancee, from their first tender moments together to his final letter and his refusal to reconcile. In this affecting book, he offers moving insights into the creativity of Franz Kafka and the torment he suffered as a man, a lover, and a writer.

Auto Da Fe is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction. Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis... Auto Da Fe was first published in Germany in 1935 as Die Blendung (The Blinding or Bedazzlement) and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Auto Da Fe still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.

With a style reminiscent of oral tradition, the Bushmen share their legends about their principal deity, the Mantis, their relationship with their environment and its animals, and some aspects of their traditions and everyday lives. "En un estilo que refleja la tradicion oral a la que corresponden sus historias, los bosquimanos narran sus leyendas relativas a su deidad principal, el Mantis, a su relacion con el entorno y los animales, y a algunos rasgos de la convivencia al interior de sus sociedades."