I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole: An Elias Canetti Reader [Paperback]

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 centurys 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 Wholeis a summa of Canettis 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 Canettis landmark texts, includingCrowds and Power, an analysis of authoritarianism and mobs;Auto-da-F?, a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel about the fate of European literature; the famous sequence of sensory-titled memoirs, includingThe Tongue Set FreeandThe Torch in My Ear; and never-before-translated writings such as the posthumousThe Book Against Death, this collection assembles its luminous shards into the fullest portrait yet of Canettis 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 Wholeleads us from Canettis polls½