Theory and Aesthetics

By Josef Albers Foreword by Nicholas Fox Weber “One of the most important books on color ever written.”—Michael Hession, Gizmodo “Interaction of Color with its illuminating visual exercises and mind-bending optical illusions, remains an indispensable blueprint to the art of seeing. . . . An essential piece of visual literacy.“—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’ unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers. This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers. Josef Albers, one of the most influential artist-educators of the twentieth century, was a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany during the 1920s. In 1933 he came to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, Albers was the first living artist ever to be given a solo retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Paperback193 pages | 40 color illustrations, 16 line drawingsYale University Press, 2013Originally published in 19636 x 0.6 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780300179354Artist Monographs, Art History, Color Theory

Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition

By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Winner of the 1983 Alfred Harcourt Prize Award for Biography and Memoirs“Both a personal and an intellectual biography...It represents biography at its best.”—Peter Berger, front page, The New York Times Book Review“A story of surprising drama...At last, we can see Arendt whole.”—Jim Miller, Newsweek“Indispensable to anyone interested in the life, the thought, or...the example of Hannah Arendt.”—Mark Feeney, Boston Globe This highly acclaimed, prize-winning biography of one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century is here reissued in a trade paperback edition for a new generation of readers. In a new preface the author offers an account of writings by and about Arendt that have appeared since the book’s 1982 publication, providing a reassessment of her subject’s life and achievement. Paperback620 pagesYale University Press, 20046.2 x 1 x 7.2 inchesISBN 9780300105889Biography, Philosophy

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Second Edition

Edited with an introduction by Peter Baehr A collection of writings by a groundbreaking political thinker, including excerpts from The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in JerusalemShe was a Jew born in Germany in the early twentieth century, and she studied with the greatest German minds of her day—Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers among them. After the rise of the Nazis, she emigrated to America where she proceeded to write some of the most searching, hard-hitting reflections on the agonizing issues of the time: totalitarianism in both Nazi and Stalinist garb; Zionism and the legacy of the Holocaust; federally mandated school desegregation and civil rights in the United States; and the nature of evil. The Portable Hannah Arendt offers substantial excerpts from the three works that ensured her international and enduring stature: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Additionally, this volume includes several other provocative essays, as well as her correspondence with other influential figures. Paperback575 pagesPenguin Classics, 20035.1 x 1.1 x 7.7 inchesISBN 9780142437568Philosophy

The Portable Hannah Arendt

By Hannah ArendtIntroduction by Margaret CanovanForeword by Danielle Allen “The combination of tremendous intellectual power with great common sense makes Arendt’s insights into history and politics seem both amazing and obvious.”—Mary McCarthy, New Yorker“Arendt’s most important philosophical work.”—Richard Wolin, New Republic“A great work of the mind and the imagination. . . . Arendt has done even more to prise open our oyster minds than she did in The Origins of Totalitarianism.”—Philip Toynbee, Guardian A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human power increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition contains Margaret Canovan's 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen. A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely. Paperback 349 pagesThe University of Chicago Press, 2018Originally published in 19586 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226586601Philosophy, Theory

The Human Condition (Second Edition)

By Hannah ArendtIntroduction by Jonathan Schell “Arendt’s admirers will welcome her excursion into the relatively neglected field of comparative revolution. She is never dull, enormously erudite, always imaginative, original and full of insights.”—The Sunday Times, LondonA unique and fascinating look at violent political change by one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century and the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt’s penetrating observations on the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape. On Revolution is her classic exploration of a phenomenon that has reshaped the globe. From the eighteenth-century rebellions in America and France to the explosive changes of the twentieth century, Arendt traces the changing face of revolution and its relationship to war while underscoring the crucial role such events will play in the future. Illuminating and prescient, this timeless work will fascinate anyone who seeks to decipher the forces that shape our tumultuous age.Paperback 368 pages Penguin, 2006Originally published in 1963 5.1 x 0.6 x 7.7 inches ISBN 9780143039907Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy

On Revolution

By Walter Benjamin Introduction by Susan SontagClassic collection of Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essays.Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions.This collection, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, showing the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics.Paperback480 pagesVerso Books, 2021Originally published in 19795 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781839761652Philosophy

One-Way Street And Other Writings

By Walter BenjaminEdited and translated by Howard Eiland “In Early Writings, Howard Eiland covers the earliest period of Benjamin’s extant oeuvre that helped form the critical project that dominated his literary and philosophical career. This volume’s range provides a comprehensive account of Benjamin’s development from an ardent advocate of youth and educational reform to a philosophically committed critic of literature.”—David Ferris, University of Colorado at Boulder“In the introduction, editor and translator Eiland does a wonderful job of explaining how the essays relate to events in Benjamin’s early adult life and to the evolution of his theories…These pieces offer the reader valuable insight into Benjamin’s philosophical thought.”—Scott Duimstra, Library Journal“This is a valuable addition to the available work in English of one of the seminal Jewish critical thinkers of the 20th century, author of the massive Arcades Project. The mostly lambent translations by editor Eiland and others…help place Benjamin’s later work within the context of his early preoccupations.”—Publishers WeeklyWalter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers.Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience.Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.Hardcover320 pagesBelknap Press, 20115.3 x 1.1 x 9.1 inchesISBN 9780674049932Philosophy, Anthology

Early Writings (1910-1917)

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings “Readers new to Benjamin will find this a welcome introduction to a challenging but rewarding writer. Those already familiar with his work will be grateful to be reminded, once again, of the wisdom of his maxim, ‘all the decisive blows are struck left-handed.’”—Graham McCann, Financial Times“The appeal of Benjamin’s writing, according to Terry Eagleton, lies in the way it ‘manages marvellously to combine…[Marxist] ‘aesthetics’ with the entrancing esotericism of the Kabbala.…Benjamin is admired not in spite of but because of his arcane syntax, murky vocabulary, and buried meanings….You have to seek the truth in Benjamin’s writings, if you have the patience, and not treat them as conveying knowledge. There is an awful lot of husk to burn in the process, but the theory of truth, if true, explains the obscurity.”—Arthur C. Danto, Artforum“Selected Writings, Volume I increases our understanding of this most important of writers exponentially. There is nothing like Benjamin, and I can hardly imagine a more rewarding book being published this year.”—David Wheatley, The Irish Times Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the many facets of his thought. Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influential journals. The volume includes a number of his most important works, including Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, The Task of the Translator, and One Way Street. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. Paperback528 pages | 7 halftonesHarvard University Press, 20046.25 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674013551Philosophy, Criticism, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith “For those who know only the small selection of essays and longer texts previously translated into English, this book may be a revelation. Selected Writings, Volume 2, spanning the period from his abandonment of academia and his emergence as an important literary journalist in 1927 to his near silencing after the Nazis seized power and his exile in 1934, shows [Walter Benjamin] at his sparkling best….All his published work of this time is included here, from a few longer essays on themes as varied as the history of photography and Kafka to three-page pieces on recent French fiction, art history, ‘the crisis of the novel,’ food and the effects of hashish. The new book also includes a generous selection of Benjamin’s notes, diary entries and drafts. Interesting in themselves, and indispensable to anyone seeking insight into Benjamin’s thinking, they also offer a view of the writer at work, developing different aspects of a thought or recycling successful paragraphs from one assignment to another.”—Paul Mattick, The New York Times Book ReviewIn the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, “Surrealism” and “On the Image of Proust,” as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany’s newspapers. Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays (“Franz Kafka,” “Karl Kraus,” and “The Author as Producer”) the extended autobiographical meditation “A Berlin Chronicle”; extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer; and previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology, and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.Paperback480 pagesHarvard University Press, 20056.3 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674015883Philosophy, Sociology, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1

Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith “Volume 2 of the Harvard edition, a welcome project that I cannot praise enough, is filled with astonishingly ‘annihilating trivia,’ as astonishing, I dare say, as Benjamin’s half-dozen fully realized monographs. Thanks to it, his luminosity, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of his premature death, is happily in focus.”—Ilan Stavans, The Forward“This second volume of [Walter Benjamin’s] selected writings covers all aspects of the time, with the great figures of European thought in the background. Surrealism, Russian films, Chaplin, Keller, Kafka, Gide, Proust, hashish, children’s toys and literature, Hoffmansthal, travel, Goethe, Berlin life, radio talks, Stefan George—it is all here and all living….This volume cannot be praised too highly.”—Gene Shaw, Library JournalIn the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, “Surrealism” and “On the Image of Proust,” as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany’s newspapers. Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays (“Franz Kafka,” “Karl Kraus,” and “The Author as Producer”) the extended autobiographical meditation “A Berlin Chronicle”; extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer; and previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology, and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.Paperback480 pagesHarvard University Press, 20056.3 x 9.25 inchesISBN: 9780674017467Philosophy, Theory, Criticism, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings “The quintessential Benjamin gesture of Volume 3 is the 1936 selection of letters by a wide assortment of figures from the German Romantic era, together with his brief, meticulously sympathetic commentaries, contained in German Men and Women….It is the story primarily of friendships amidst the passages and misfortunes of time, and of ideas as the substance of friendship: Their exchange becomes the fabric that connects one individual to another, and binds each to their precarious, uncertain lives.”—Howard Hampton, The Village Voice Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie—such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated. The centerpiece, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, marks the first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of the twentieth century: a profound and beautiful account of the vanished world of Benjamin's privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," with its striking insights into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and German Men and Women, a book in which Benjamin collects twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German tradition from the debasement of fascism. Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of modernism and modernity—such as The Storyteller and Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century—as well as a fascinating diary from 1938 and penetrating studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and Denmark. This is an essential collection for anyone interested in his work. Paperback480 pagesBelknap Press, 20066.4 x 0.9 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780674019812Philosophy, Criticism, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings “The final volume in this collection of the German philosopher’s writing, this title covers the last three years of Benjamin’s life and is masterfully translated, edited, and annotated. Presented here are Benjamin’s grandest themes: the arcades of Paris, Baudelaire, the concept of remembrance, and materialist theology. Also included is the third version of Benjamin’s most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” which was unpublished in the author’s lifetime. This essay alone makes the volume indispensable for any scholar of interwar literature, philosophy, or modern European thought. Together with the first three volumes in the set (1996–2002), this is one of the most remarkable editorial achievements in contemporary thought and politics.”—M. Uebel, Choice“Every line we succeed in publishing today…is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness.” So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin’s writings in the final years of his life, the “victories wrested” in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin’s own faith in the written word.This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist—a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Also included in this volume is his influential piece On the Concept of History, completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of “the modern” (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.Paperback496 pages | 4 halftonesHarvard University Press, 20066.3 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674022294Philosophy, Sociology, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940

By Walter BenjaminTranslated from the German by Harry ZohnA classic account of late nineteenth-century Paris and a study of Baudelaire’s life and workWalter Benjamin, one of the foremost cultural commentators and theorists of this century, is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history.Yet it was through his study of the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth-century Paris, examined particularly in relation to the figure of the great Parisian lyric poet Charles Baudelaire, that Benjamin tested and enriched some of his core concepts and themes. Contained within these pages are, amongst other insights, his notion of the flaneur, his theory of memory and remembrance, his assessment of the utopian Fourier and his reading of the modernist movement.Paperback192 pagesVerso, 20235 x 1 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781904290453Theory, Modernism

Charles Baudelaire

By Walter BenjaminIntroduction by George SteinerTranslated by John Osborne"He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe."—Susan Sontag"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first great crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener"Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century."—George SteinerThe Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.Paperback256 pagesVerso Publishers, 20235 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781804290460Literary Theory

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

By Walter BenjaminTranslated by Howard Eiland Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” but in fact the subject is something else―the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays―though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal. Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics. Paperback336 pagesHarvard University Press, 2019Originally published in 19285.5 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9780674744240Philosophy, Drama

Origin of the German Trauerspiel

By Walter BenjaminAn NYRB Classics OriginalEdited by Samuel TitanTranslated by Tess Lewis “[T]he newly published collection The Storyteller Essays, translated by Tess Lewis and edited by Samuel Titan, marks a unique achievement. . . . It provides a brief intellectual history of an essay and revivifies it.”—Clint Williamson, Full Stop“[B]ecause it is delivered without panic, quietly, in graceful sentences, from within the culture of books and criticism, it is hard at first to accept the implications of what Benjamin is saying. You suspect he is being bombastic in order for him to come back later and tell you what modern literature’s saving grace is, but the moment of redemption does not arrive. . . . Reading such claims over eighty years later, we might be reminded that every generation foresees a crisis and the end of the world as we know it. It is also possible that Benjamin had his eyes wide open at the beginning of our era and proved able to observe its salient features.”—Philip Ó Ceallaigh, The Stinging Fly The Storyteller is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began. Paperback128 pagesNYRB Classics, 20195 x 0.4 x 8 inchesISBN 9781681370583Theory, Short Essays, Criticism

The Storyteller Essays

By Gershom ScholemIntroduction by Lee SiegelTranslated by Harry Zohn “The force of this remarkable memoir derives as much from the insights it offers into the mind and beliefs of the writer as into those of its subject.”—Publishers Weekly“Walter Benjamin [was] perhaps the most subtle, intuitive, and creative critic of the age….Since Scholem is himself a great scholar and thinker, since the intellectual comradeship between the two was so intense for a long time, the commingling of their thoughts comes to be even more revealing than the life-facts themselves….An invaluable document about not merely one but two of the century’s most profound minds.”—Kirkus Reviews Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship—which was to remain crucial for both men—is both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940. At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life. Paperback328 pagesNYRB Classics, 2003Originally published in 19815 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9781590170328Memoir, Literary Criticism, Philosophy

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship

By Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings “[An] outstanding and monumental biography of Walter Benjamin….In the thoroughness of their account and the acuity and delicacy of their philosophical analyses, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings have provided an indispensable sighting of Benjamin’s achievement.”—Anthony Phelan, The Times Literary Supplement“[This] is a careful synthesis of all the available sources for Benjamin’s life—letters, diaries, reminiscences of friends—with all of his major writings, to produce the comprehensive account that has been sorely lacking until now….Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life makes clear how intimately Benjamin’s biography was shaped by the history of Europe during his lifetime.”—Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings—mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology—defy simple categorization. And his mobile, often improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. That career was played out amid some of the most catastrophic decades of modern European history: the horror of the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, and the lengthening shadow of fascism. Now, a major new biography from two of the world's foremost Benjamin scholars reaches beyond the mosaic and the mythical to present this intriguing figure in full.Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike. Paperback768 pagesBelknap Press, 20162.2 x 6.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780674970779Biography, Philosophy

Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

By Eli Friedlander “This highly original study by Friedlander is a rare attempt to expose the philosophical infrastructure of the thought of Walter Benjamin. Rather than a collection of disjointed observations on culture, the Benjaminian corpus turns, on Friedlander’s reading, into a singular testimony to the fragile and liminal possibility of philosophy that refuses to assimilate the singular under the umbrella of universal abstraction….Friedlander pays special attention to Benjamin’s relation to Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, accentuating the problems of temporality, historicity, and a philosophically robust materialism. A laudable achievement, this volume is an exquisite dialogue between philosophy and its others, between totality and constellation, and between the universal and the singular.”—M.V. Marder, Choice“Benjamin is not, for Friedlander, just a writer or a thinker, he is a philosopher of world-historical significance, and his work is a vessel of the highest truth.”—Brian Hanrahan, Los Angeles Review of Books Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic pieces of writing with little more to unify them than the feeling that they all bear the stamp of his "unclassifiable" genius. Eli Friedlander argues that Walter Benjamin's corpus of writings must be recognized as a unique configuration of philosophy with an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition.Friedlander finds in Benjamin's early works initial formulations of the different dimensions of his philosophical thinking. He leads through them to Benjamin's views on the dialectical image, the nature of language, the relation of beauty and truth, embodiment, dream and historical awakening, myth and history, as well as the afterlife and realization of meaning. Those notions are articulated both in themselves and in relation to central figures of the philosophical tradition. They are further viewed as leading to and coming together in The Arcades Project. Friedlander takes that incomplete work to be the central theater where these earlier philosophical preoccupations were to be played out. Benjamin envisaged in it the possibility of the highest order of thought taking the form of writing whose contents are the concrete time-bound particularities of human experience. Addressing the question of the possibility of such a presentation of philosophical truth provides the guiding thread for constellating the disparate moments of Benjamin's writings.Hardcover304 pagesHarvard University Press, 20126.2 x 1 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780674061699Philosophy, Criticism

Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait

By Albert EinsteinCollected and Edited by Alice CalapriceForeword by Freeman Dyson "[The Ultimate Quotable Einstein] is a compelling selection. . . . Students of Einstein's work and life, who are familiar with these contexts, can find many embellishments to their research, and often puzzling contrary notes to customary portrayals of his stance on issues ranging from Zionism to domestic life."—ChoiceThis is the definitive edition of the hugely popular collection of Einstein quotations that has been translated into twenty-five languages.The Ultimate Quotable Einstein features roughly 1,600 quotes in all. This paperback edition includes sections unique to the ultimate collection—"On and to Children," "On Race and Prejudice," and "Einstein's Verses: A Small Selection"—as well as a chronology of Einstein's life and accomplishments, Freeman Dyson's authoritative foreword, and commentary and descriptive source notes by Alice Calaprice. Paperback608 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20134.2 x 1.8 x 7.2 inchesISBN 9780691160146Quote books, Physics

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein

Translated by Stuart Gilbert Additional text by Ulrich Baer In 1932, Albert Einstein was invited by the League of Nations to address a letter on any subject to any individual. He chose to corresponded with Sigmund Freud on avoiding war. Einstein maintained the importance of establishing an independent judiciary body to mediate conflicts. Freud agreed with this idea but also felt that “there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies.” To this day, the correspondence on war by two of the greatest thinkers of all time proves prescient and remains indispensable. The correspondence between Einstein and Freud was originally published by The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in 1933. Included in this edition is Freud’s essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” two pieces by Einstein on disarmament and the crisis facing affluent societies, and a biographical account of their original encounter and further exchanges. Paperback81 pagesWarbler Classics, 20235 x .203 x 8 inchesISBN 9781962572170

Why War? A Correspondence Between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud

By Peter Gay "Brilliant.…A dazzling performance.…Gay's ability to integrate into a coherent whole the vast published and unpublished literature on Freud including hundreds of previously unknown or inaccessible letters is awesome.…A work of art."—Jonathan Sharp, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle"Intelligent and wholly absorbing.…Judicious, original biography, scrupulously grounded in close readings of [Freud's] work."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"Elegant…puts Freud's life into the context of his time while attempting to explain him for readers who cannot escape his shadow. In Gay's hands, the Olympian figure is almost within mortal reach."—Michael Skube, Raleigh News and Observer A New York Times bestseller, this is the most highly regarded biography of Freud ever written. To read this book is to enter the world of Sigmund Freud as never before: his family, his city, his professional struggles, his long fruitful and embattled life. Drawing on a vast store of unpublished documents, including hundreds of hitherto unknown or inaccessible letters, Peter Gay deals frankly with the controversies that have long swirled around Freud's impassioned friendships, his love life, and his theoretical innovations which, as Freud himself put it, agitated the sleep of mankind. Paperback864 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 20066.2 x 1.6 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780393328615Biography, Psychology

Freud: A Life For Our Time

By Sigmund FreudEdited by Peter GayWhat to read from the vast output of Sigmund Freud has long been a puzzle. Freudian thought permeates virtually every aspect of twentieth-century life; to understand Freud is to explore not only his scientific papers—on the psycho-sexual theory of human development, his theory of the mind, and the basic techniques of psychoanalysis—but also his vivid writings on art, literature, religion, politics, and culture.The fifty-one texts in this volume range from Freud's dreams, to essays on sexuality, and on to his late writings, including Civilization and Its Discontents. Peter Gay, a leading scholar of Freud and his work, has carefully chosen these selections to provide a full portrait of Freud's thought. His clear introductions to the selections help guide the reader's journey through each work.Many of the selections are reproduced in full. All have been selected from the Standard Edition, the only English translation for which Freud gave approval both to the editorial plan and to specific renderings of key words and phrases.Paperback896 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 19955.2 x 1.7 x 8.4 inchesISBN 9780393314038Philosophy, Anthology

The Freud Reader

By Anthony Storr "Invaluable to the novice approaching Freud's works for the first time....As an evaluation of Freud's theory, Storr's book is concise and up-to-date....An important addition to any library collection."—Choice"Storr's brief, elegant, and interesting book coolly surveys what we might term the house of Freud and finds almost everything flawed...yet he does not dispute that the builder of the shaky house was a genius."—D.M. Thomas, The Observer"A model exercise in synthesis."—The IndependentSigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, developed a totally new way of looking at human nature. Only now, with the hindsight of the half-century since his death, can we assess his true legacy to current thought. As an experienced psychiatrist himself, Anthony Storr offers a lucid and objective look at Freud's major theories, evaluating whether they have stood the test of time, and in the process examines Freud himself in light of his own ideas. An excellent introduction to Freud's work, this book will appeal to all those broadly curious about psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology.Paperback166 pagesOxford University Press, 20016.8 x 0.6 x 4.2 inchesISBN 9780192854551Psychology

Freud: A Very Short Introduction

By Mary Bergstein “Visual Cultures in Freud's Vienna provides for the first time a serious and comprehensive account of seeing in Freud's Vienna. With the acumen of a brilliant historian of photography and the visual arts, Bergstein meticulously reconstructs the visual ambience of fin-de-siècle Austria, exposing many of the subliminal patterns of seeing in Freud's world. A necessary read for those engaged in understanding how our visual world limits and expands our understanding of psychic processes.” ―Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Director, Program of Psychoanalysis, Emory University, USA Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna shows how photography and film in turn-of-the-century Vienna (the birthplace of psychoanalysis) not only reflected modernist ideas already in force, but helped to bring into being what might be referred to as a “psychoanalytic imagination.” Mary Bergstein demonstrates that visual images not only illustrated, but also engendered ways of seeing social, psychological, and scientific ideas during a formative time in the creation and development of psychoanalysis and the modern age. Indeed, she argues that visual culture initiated significant aspects of psychoanalytic thought.Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna examines a variety of visual materials and texts, ranging from scientific illustrations to popular "low culture" and even forms of erotica, including film. Attention is also given to women's dresses and shoes in a social context and as they are represented in photography and circulated as fetish objects.Bergstein maintains a commitment to women's history and feminist inquiry throughout, particularly in her final chapter, which is devoted to the representations of women in the erotic photography and film. Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna is well illustrated with images drawn from the sources discussed and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modernism and psychoanalysis.Paperback240 pages | 68 color and black-and-white imagesBloomsbury Academic, 20245.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9798765111956 Sigmund Freud, Viennese Culture

Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

By Hannah S. DeckerThis book studies one of Freud's famous, but unhappiest cases 'Dora'—an adolescent girl from the upper-middle-class Viennese-Jewish family that he treated in his early years as a psychoanalyst. Hannah Decker does a wonderful job of locating both Freud and Dora in their historical context and of reconstructing attitudes about Jews, women, and doctors in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Decker explores the psychoanalytic encounter between Freud and the 18-year-old girl he called "Dora" against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle Vienna and against the backdrop, too, of the virulent antisemitism that characterized the period and pervaded the lives of Viennese Jews. Paperback320 pagesFree Press, 19925.5 x 0.8 x 8.4 inchesISBN 9780029072127Psychology, Austrian History

Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900

By Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-SaloméEdited by Ernst PfeifferTranslated by William Robson-Scott and Elaine Robson-Scott Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a writer and disciple of Freud who became a practicing analyst. For over two decades she and Freud kept up an intensive correspondence. Freud found in her a perceptive appreciator and amplifier of his ideas, and Frau Andreas found him a sympathetic critic of her own. Their exchanges on theoretical topics and clinical experiences, their admiring friendship, and the glimpses of their personalities makes this collection invaluable for readers interested in the history of psychoanalysis. Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote her first letter to Freud in 1912, asking his permission to come to Vienna for psychoanalytical training. This extraordinary Russian woman, whose intelligence and beauty captivated Nietzsche and Rilke, now captivated Freud, while she discovered in Freud's psychoanalysis the true fulfillment of her life. Freud's letters contain revealing commentaries on his working methods, his conception of narcissism, and his interpretation of Moses, and they treat the themes that preoccupied him in old age: death, religion, war. Frau Andreas's topics include her relationship to Rilke, and her reaction to his death, and the psychology of the artist. The book includes an introduction and notes by Ernst Pfeiffer, Lou Andreas-Salomé's literary executor. Paperback264 pagesW. W. Norton & Company, 19855.3 x 0.6 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9780393302615Biography, Psychology

Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters

By Élisabeth RoudinescoTranslated by Catherine Porter Original Price: $35.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS “Through seamlessly and eloquently weaving together details from Freud’s time and our own, [Roudinesco] provides a refreshingly new and welcome account—warts and all.”—Janet Sayers, Times Higher Education“What makes Freud: In His Time And Ours…such a captivating read, is the author’s ability to explain what are often complex, deeply-layered, and dark taboo subjects, into a language that is easily understood…[A] brilliant biography.”—J. P. O’Mallery, The Irish Examiner“[Roudinesco] provides an insightful, balanced, and sympathetic portrait of Freud. As she assesses Freud’s revolutionary ideas about rationality, sexuality, and the unconscious, Roudinesco demonstrates that Freud was less a scientific thinker who uncovered universal truths than a product of his time: a genius, to be sure, but very much a bourgeois shaped by society, family, and politics in the late 19th century… Her critique has an especially persuasive force because it is grounded not only in an analysis of Freud’s books, diaries, and letters but from accounts of his sessions with patients.”—Glenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today Élisabeth Roudinesco offers a bold and modern reinterpretation of the iconic founder of psychoanalysis. Based on new archival sources, this is Freud’s biography for the twenty-first century—a critical appraisal, at once sympathetic and impartial, of a genius greatly admired and yet greatly misunderstood in his own time and in ours.Roudinesco traces Freud’s life from his upbringing as the eldest of eight siblings in a prosperous Jewish-Austrian household to his final days in London, a refugee of the Nazis’ annexation of his homeland. She recreates the milieu of fin de siècle Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire—an era of extraordinary artistic innovation, given luster by such luminaries as Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Mahler. In the midst of it all, at the modest residence of Berggasse 19, Freud pursued his clinical investigation of nervous disorders, blazing a path into the unplumbed recesses of human consciousness and desire.Yet this revolutionary who was overthrowing cherished notions of human rationality and sexuality was, in his politics and personal habits, in many ways conservative, Roudinesco shows. In his chauvinistic attitudes toward women, and in his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of Hitler until it was nearly too late, even the analytically-minded Freud had his blind spots. Alert to his intellectual complexity—the numerous tensions in his character and thought that remained unresolved—Roudinesco ultimately views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as the master interpreter of civilization and culture. Hardcover592 pagesHarvard University Press, 20166.2 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674659568Biography, Psychology

Freud: In His Time and Ours

By Anthony StorrIntroduction by Anthony StorrForeword by John Beebe "This is by far the best introduction to the work and thought of Carl Gustav Jung now available [1983]. I wish it were possible to require that every teacher and critic, cleric and cocktail-party magus who takes the name of Jung upon his tongue should have read Anthony Storr's admirable compilation at least once, for untold misunderstanding and unwarranted assumption would be saved thereby. . . . Once again, thanks and praise to Anthony Storr, clinical lecturer in psychiatry in the University of Oxford, for a masterly achievement."—Robertson Davies, The Globe and Mail"This is the best introductory book for the serious reader. Add it to the autobiography and The Freud/Jung Letters and one has the beginning of a lifetime's serious entertainment."—J. D. O'Hara, Virginia Quarterly Review"Storr has boiled down Jung's prolific thoughts on man's mental state to this generous and stimulating anthology."—Sunday StandardIn this compact volume, British psychiatrist and writer Anthony Storr has selected extracts from Jung's writings that pinpoint his many original contributions and relate the development of his thought to his biography. Storr's explanatory notes and introduction show the progress and coherence of Jung's ideas, including such concepts as the collective unconscious, the archetypes, introversion and extroversion, individuation, and Jung's view of integration as the goal of the development of the personality. Jung maintained that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves and that our most pressing task is to deflect our gaze away from the external world and toward the study of our own nature. In a world torn by conflict and threatened by annihilation, his message has an urgent relevance for every thoughtful person.Anthony Storr (1920-2001) was a consultant psychotherapist, journalist, broadcaster, and popular writer. He is the author of Solitude: A Return to the Self. John Beebe is a past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He is the editor of Jung's Aspects of the Masculine and the coeditor of The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C. G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915-1916 (Princeton). Paperback448 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20135.6 x 1.3 x 8.4 inchesISBN 9780691159003Psychology

The Essential Jung: Selected and Introduced

By Jay Sherry Carl Gustav Jung has always been a popular but never a fashionable thinker. His ground-breaking theories about dream interpretation and psychological types have often been overshadowed by charges that he was anti-Semitic and a Nazi sympathizer. This award-winning study considers these allegations in the broader context of Jung's views on culture, politics, and race. In doing so, it provides a carefully considered, historically informed perspective on a figure whose legacy has been misunderstood by admirers and detractors alike. Paperback282 pagesPalgrave Macmillan, 20105.6 x 0.6 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9781137281944Psychology

Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative

By Judith HarrisEdited by Judith Harris "This well-structured collection of Jung quotations is intended primarily as an introduction to the psychoanalyst's work, though even those who are more knowledgeable will find it useful for inspirational browsing. . . . This work surpasses the previously most comprehensive collection of Jung's quotations."—Choice"Brings all of Jung's ideas together in brilliant form. . . . [The Quotable Jung] plucks out Jung's best moments of clarity and organizes them in a way that makes Jung accessible to the uninitiated. . . . Unlike most compendiums, the selected quotes build on one another, providing a logical succession of ideas. One could read the book from cover to cover and acquire an advanced understanding of Jung's entire opus."—Andrew Ladd, First Things "A simple and clear introduction to many of Jung's ideas and works."—Amanda Izenstark, ARBAC. G. Jung (1875–1961) was a preeminent thinker of the modern era. In seeking to establish an interdisciplinary science of analytical psychology, he studied psychiatry, religion, mysticism, literature, physics, biology, education, and criminology. He introduced the concepts of extraversion and introversion, and terms such as complex, archetype, individuation, and the collective unconscious. He stressed the primacy of finding meaning in our lives.The Quotable Jung is the single most comprehensive collection of Jung quotations ever assembled. It is the essential introduction for anyone new to Jung and the Jungian tradition. It will also inspire those familiar with Jung to view him in an entirely new way. The Quotable Jung presents hundreds of the most representative selections from the vast array of Jung's books, essays, correspondence, lectures, seminars, and interviews, as well as the celebrated Red Book, in which Jung describes his own fearsome confrontation with the unconscious. Organized thematically, this collection covers such topics as the psyche, the symbolic life, dreams, the analytic process, good and evil, creativity, alchemical transformation, death and rebirth, the problem of the opposites, and more. The quotations are arranged so that the reader can follow the thread of Jung’s thought on these topics while gaining an invaluable perspective on his writings as a whole. Succinct and accessible, The Quotable Jung also features a preface by Judith Harris and a detailed chronology of Jung’s life and work. The single most comprehensive collection of Jung quotations ever assembled. Features hundreds of quotes Covers such topics as the psyche, dreams, good and evil, death and rebirth, and more. Includes a detailed chronology of Jung’s life and work Serves as the ideal introduction to Jung and the Jungian tradition Paperback376 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20185.5 x 1 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9780691181196Psychology

The Quotable Jung

By Ronald Hayman "Compelling....Hayman captures...the extraordinary charisma of his subject."—Newsday"Likely to become the standard biography of the revolutionary psychoanalyst."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review"[M]eticulously researched...judicious....intelligently illuminates the private life Jung deliberately veiled in shadow."—The New York Times Book Review Carl Jung was one of the world's most influential psychoanalysts. With the exception of Freud, who chose him as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, no psychologist has achieved more. Previous biographers have either made Jung an idol or condemned him for his failings. This "rounded, provocative, and revealing portrait of an extraordinary man and his extraordinarily influential ideas" (Washington Post Book World) neither ignores Jung's faults nor exaggerates them in investigating the most crucial paradoxes surrounding this enigmatic figure. "[C]aptur[ing] ... the extraordinary charisma of his subject" (Newsday), Ronald Hayman's impeccably researched work is "all the more effective for its detached tone that perfectly puts in proportion Jung's cruel, brilliant and crazy schemes" (The [London] Times). "Likely to become the standard biography of the revolutionary psychoanalyst" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), A Life of Jung offers a rare insight into how Jung's revolutionary ideas grew out of his own extraordinary experiences. Paperback561 pagesW.W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition, 20025.5 x 1.4 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780393323221Biography, Psychology

A Life of Jung

Edited by Julian Preece University of Kent, CanterburyContributors: Julian Preece, David Constantine, Anne Fuchs, Rolf J. Goebel, Elizabeth Boa, Ruth V. Gross, Stanley Corngold, Bill Dodd, Iris Bruce, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Anthony Northey, Osman Durrani, Helen Hughes, Martin Brady "...a welcome addition to Kafka scholarship."—Germanic Notes and Reviews "This collection of essays holds true to the promise of its title: it is a trustworthy and helpful companion for those, be they scholar or aficionado, who seek up-to-date and well-considered observations on the writings of one of the 20th century's greatest but most enigmatic writers....[A]ll of the contributions are first-rate: they are written clearly and persuasively with authority and sophistication, and they represent a broad spectrrm of critical approaches." Choice This companion of specially-commissioned essays offers a comprehensive account of his life and work, providing a rounded contemporary appraisal of Central Europe's most distinctive Modernist. Contributions cover all the key texts, and discuss Kafka's writing in a variety of critical contexts such as feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Jewish studies. The essays are enhanced by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. They will be of interest to students of German, European and Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies. Paperback 280 pages Cambridge University Press, 20026 x 0.7 x 9 inches ISBN 9780521663915 Literary Criticism, Essays

The Cambridge Companion to Kafka

By Sander L. Gilman "Recognises that comprehensive, overarching interpretations . . . attenuate or simply miss the sheer strangeness of Kafka’s fictional world."—Jonathan Derbyshire, Financial TimesThe conflation of reality and the fantastic, ambiguity, the relentless confrontation with horror, the fractured sense of identity: Franz Kafka created a wholly unique and enduring worldview through his literature and life, and he remains one of the central intellectual and cultural figures of our time. Sander L. Gilman brings together Kafka's literary works, personal writings, and biography to create a compelling and wholly accessible narrative of the literary master's life.Gilman focuses on the relationship between Kafka's life and work, reconstructing both Kafka's cultural environment and the writer's conceptual understanding of his own body. Kafka's letters, diaries, and writings emerge in Gilman's analysis as windows into his ongoing attempt to create an identity in a world where being a Central European Jew dictated an uneasy fate. The volume emphasizes in particular the image and role of the Jew in Kafka's modern world and how Kafka responded to prevailing attitudes, repressive actions, and stereotypes in society at large. Gilman also examines the influence of psychoanalytic ideas on Kafka and his works, exploring how Kafka wove such psychoanalytic experiences into his literature. Gilman concludes with consideration of the "Kafka-myth" and the wealth of material emerging from it over the past eighty years, including work by such illustrious minds as Walter Benjamin and Ted Hughes. Franz Kafka features illuminating archival photographs and illustrations as well as a comprehensive bibliography and filmography of work by and about Kafka. This succinct yet penetrating volume offers valuable and original insight into how Kafka's life and work shaped how we perceive our modern society and how, indeed, some aspect of the world is always "Kafkaesque."Paperback160 pagesReaktion Books, 20055 x 0.4 x 7.9 inchesISBN 9781861892546Biography, Literary Criticism

Franz Kafka: Critical Lives

Original Price: $24.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Reiner StachTranslated by Shelley Frisch One of The Guardian Best Books of 2013, chosen by Colm Tóibín"Most impressive is Stach's recounting of the creation of his subject's writings. . . . Stach's own writing is wonderfully expressive."—Publishers Weekly, starred review"A scrupulous, discriminating, and highly instructive account of Kafka's life."—Robert Alter, New Republic"This extraordinary biography fills the empty spaces between Kafka's own writings and the writings of friends, family, and contemporaries with so much empathy and imagination that one can't put it down."—Frankfurter Rundschau How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis". Brimming with vivid and often startling details, Stach’s narrative invites readers deep inside this neglected period of Kafka’s life. The book’s richly atmospheric portrait of his German Jewish merchant family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates’ memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod. The biography also provides a colorful panorama of Kafka’s wider world, especially the convoluted politics and culture of Prague. Before World War I, Kafka lived in a society at the threshold of modernity but torn by conflict, and Stach provides poignant details of how the adolescent Kafka witnessed violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. The reader also learns how he developed a passionate interest in new technologies, particularly movies and airplanes, and why another interest―his predilection for the back-to-nature movement―stemmed from his “nervous” surroundings rather than personal eccentricity. The crowning volume to a masterly biography, this is an unmatched account of how a boy who grew up in an old Central European monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature. Paperback584 pagesPrinceton University Press; reprint edition, 2017Originally published in 20146.1 x 1.6 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780691178189Biography, Literary Criticism

Kafka: The Early Years [Paperback]

Original Price: $35 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERSBy Reiner Stach The eagerly anticipated final volume of the award-winning, definitive biography of Franz Kafka.How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis." Brimming with vivid and often startling details, Stach’s narrative invites readers deep inside this neglected period of Kafka’s life. The book’s richly atmospheric portrait of his German Jewish merchant family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates’ memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod.The biography also provides a colorful panorama of Kafka’s wider world, especially the convoluted politics and culture of Prague. Before World War I, Kafka lived in a society at the threshold of modernity but torn by conflict, and Stach provides poignant details of how the adolescent Kafka witnessed violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. The reader also learns how he developed a passionate interest in new technologies, particularly movies and airplanes, and why another interest―his predilection for the back-to-nature movement―stemmed from his “nervous” surroundings rather than personal eccentricity.The crowning volume to a masterly biography, this is an unmatched account of how a boy who grew up in an old Central European monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature.Hardcover584 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20166.3 x 1.7 x 9.4 inchesISBN 9780691151984 Biography, Czech Writer

Kafka: The Early Years [Hardcover]

By Costas DespiniadisTranslated by Stelios Kapsomenos "This book is a rare event: a political—in the noblest meaning of the word—interpretation of Kafka’s writings. Even better, it is an anarchist reading, against the grain of the conformist academic prose on the author of The Trial. Despiniadis brings together, with admirable talent, literature, philosophy, and contemporary revolutionary issues."—Michael Löwy, author of Franz Kafka, subversive dreamer, University of Michigan Press, 2016The study of Franz Kafka’s work has seen a steady rise in past decades, with interest broad and growing. With its breadth of sources and bold interpretation, Franz Kafka: The Anatomist of Power is a fascinating new look at one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. Of interest to both academic and public audiences, his work spans multiple disciplines, including literature, gender studies, Jewish studies, modern history, and political theory. Although Kafka has been established for many years as a leading light of Western literature, and interest in his writings continue to grow, no work has yet fully focused on Kafka’s criticism of power institutions in his literary work. The anti-authoritarian dimension of Kafka's work, long silenced in established criticism, is explored for the first time in this book. Supported by a close reading of Kafka's diaries, this book reconstructs Kafka's active participation in Prague’s anarchist circles between 1909-1912, discussing his wide interest in anarchist authors, his skepticism towards the Russian Revolution, and his ambivalent relationship with Utopian Zionism.Paperback148 pagesBlack Rose Books, 20185.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9781551646565Literature Criticism

The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority

By Karel TeigeTranslated by Greg EvansThe first English translation of Karel Teige’s “The Marketplace of Art“ in two volumes includes a critical introduction, inquiries, and extensive commentaries. Originally published in the Czech language in 1936, “The Marketplace of Art“ is the summation of Teige’s artistic, political, and theoretical work.Acclaimed as one of the leading theoreticians of avant-garde art and architecture between the two world wars, Teige’s more political writings still remain to be discovered. Written in 1936, in the context of the rising conservative right-wing culture, and during the intense debates between the avant-garde artists and the Communist Party, “The Marketplace of Art“ is a response to the capitulation of contemporary art to fascist and Stalinist currents. Teige discusses this reaction as something deeply inscribed into the culture of the bourgeoisie, which he claims is a culture “not able to create and inspire any other kind of art besides a hollow and pompous academism or sentimental kitsch.” Teige’s Marxist analysis of the art market shows in which way this culture is tied with capitalist institutions and he offers artistic and political strategies to oppose its absolutism. In today’s warmongering culture of authoritarian neoliberalism where the contemporary art market is run by oligarchs, Karel Teige’s radical critique of the art market is more relevant than ever.Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Joseph Grim Feinberg, the book is published in collaboration with Contradictions/Kontradikce Journal based in Prague. The commentary volume includes commissioned essays by Zbyněk Baladrán, Dave Beech, Jana Ndiaye Berankova, Michel Chevalier, Esther Leslie, John Roberts, and Paul Wood, as well as an inquiry on “The Marketplace of Art” with responses from František Dryje, Tomáš Hříbek, Rea Michalová, Šimon Svěrák, and Roman Telerovský.Paperback72 pages | 136 pagesRab Rab Press, 2022 4.9 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9789526938981Theory, Czech Criticism

The Marketplace of Art /  Commentary (Two Volume Set)

By Ilya ZdanevichEdited by Sezgin BoynikTranslated by Pavels Smišlajevs and Michel ChevalierThe second volume of the bie bao series presents a eulogy entitled Iliazda at the Birthday Party, a pseudo-autobiographical lecture delivered by Ilya Zdanevich in Paris in 1922. It reports on Zdanevich's artistic and political adventures up until then. Along with an autobiography full of self-admiration, in this lecture Zdanevich gives an interpretation of his zaum dramas inspired by Freudianism, and humorously describes a colorful image of the Russian microcosm in Montparnasse.Additionally, this second volume also includes Iliazd's letter to Ardengo Soffici from 1964, where one can read, in the most unambiguous terms, about Zdanevich's positions against war, imperialism, and all forms of nationalism. Subtitled 50 Years of Russian Futurism, the letter to Soffici presents us with an altogether new Zdanevich—a "fellow traveller" in both leftist and avant-garde circles. As well as the extended introduction and extensive annotations, the texts are further contextualized with Johanna Drucker's visual presentation of the birth of the Iliazd cult. Paperback96 pagesRab-Rab Press, 20226.6 x 4.3 inchesISBN 9789526938998Autobiography

Iliazda at the Birthday Party: Autiobiographical Lecture, 1922

By Ilya Zdanevich, Marzio Marzaduri, and Elvin BrandhiEdited by Sezgin BoynikThe first volume in bie bao series dedicated to militant zaum investigations of Ilya Zdanevich—Iliazd (1894-1975). Zdanevich was a poet, designer, typographer, theoretician, and publisher who developed a new philosophy and methodology from zaum (trans-sense) experiments.The first volume of the bie bao series presents Zdanevich’s talk Le degré 41 sinapisé on the “pearl disease” in language, reporting on the potential of zaum to destroy not only social and national barriers, but also the ones dividing humans and animals. This first English translation of the talk from 1922 is introduced together with a short note by Marzio Marzaduri, an Italian scholar who first published the sinapisé lecture from the manuscript in its original Russian. The volume also includes an experimental essay by Elvin Brandhi, a Welsh musician who sent her text to us from Istanbul, while on a long layover on the way to Beirut on February 22nd 2022, exactly one hundred years on from the date Zdanevich initially gave the lecture.Paperback48 pagesRab-Rab Press, 20224.3 x 6.7 inchesISBN 9789526938967Essays, Theory

Le degré 41 sinapisé: Lecture on Pearl Disease Paris 1922

By Wassily Kandinsky "I had the impression that here painting itself comes to the foreground; I wondered if it would not be possible to go further in this direction." Thus did the young Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) react to his first viewing of Monet's Haystack, included in an 1895 Moscow exhibit of French Impressionists. It was his first perception of the dematerialization of an object and presaged the later development of his influential theories of non-objective art.During study and travel in Europe, the young artist breathed the heady atmosphere of artistic experimentation. Fauvism, Cubism, Symbolism, and other movements played an important role in the development of his own revolutionary approach to painting. Decrying literal representation, Kandinsky emphasized instead the importance of form, color, rhythm, and the artist's inner need in expressing reality.In Point and Line to Plane, one of the most influential books in 20th-century art, Kandinsky presents a detailed exposition of the inner dynamics of non-objective painting. Relying on his own unique terminology, he develops the idea of point as the "proto-element" of painting, the role of point in nature, music, and other art, and the combination of point and line that results in a unique visual language. He then turns to an absorbing discussion of line—the influence of force on line, lyric and dramatic qualities, and the translation of various phenomena into forms of linear expression. With profound artistic insight, Kandinsky points out the organic relationship of the elements of painting, touching on the role of texture, the element of time, and the relationship of all these elements to the basic material plane called upon to receive the content of a work of art.Originally published in 1926, this essay represents the mature flowering of ideas first expressed in Kandinsky's earlier seminal book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. As an influential member of the Bauhaus school and a leading theoretician of abstract expressionism, Kandinsky helped formulate the modern artistic temperament. This book amply demonstrates the importance of his contribution and its profound effect on 20th-century art. Paperback 192 pagesDover Publications, 19799.3 x 6.6 x 0.5 inchesISBN 9780486238081Art History, Art Theory, Philosophy

Point and Line to Plane

By Wassily KandinskyTranslated by M.T.H. Sadler A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art. Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings.This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting. Paperback96 pagesDover Publications; Revised edition, 19770.2 x 5.5 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780486234113Art History, Theory, Criticism

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

By Friedrich Nietzsche "In truth there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross," declares Friedrich Nietzsche in this famous attack on Christianity and organized religion. A deep exploration and repudiation of Christian symbolism and morality, The Antichrist was the last of Nietzsche's works save for his autobiography, Ecco Homo. As such, it may be regarded as a final statement of some of his most important ideas.This polemic is also one of the philosopher's most conventionally formatted books, consisting of a connected argument with few digressions and a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Indeed, it ranks among philosophy's most accessible and easily understood works, consisting of 62 brief chapters. Each chapter features an aphorism that advances the author's arguments against Christian tenets. Fast-paced, concise, and brimming with conviction, Nietzsche's landmark work is essential to a grasp of his complete oeuvre.Paperback 96 pages Dover Publications, 2018 Originally published in 18885 x 8 x 0.1 inches ISBN 9780486826660Philosophy

The Antichrist

By Friedrich NietzscheIntroduction by Chad WellmonEdited by Paul ReitterTranslated by Damion Searls “Prof. Nietzsche was one of the most prominent of modern German philosophers, and he is considered the apostle of extreme modern rationalism and one of the founders of the socialistic school, whose ideas have had such a profound influence on the growth of political and social life throughout the civilized world…his doctrines however, were inspired by lofty aspirations, while the brilliancy of his thought and diction and the epigrammatic force of his writings commanded even the admiration of his most pronounced enemies, of which he had many.”—The New York Times “Nietzsche wants to hear idols break. Dismay, exasperation, anger, outrage, disgust, humiliation disappointment: they fuel his philosophy, and it is little without them. Exhilaration, joy, exuberance, excess: they feed it too.”—William H. Gass“Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s introduction and notes helpfully contextualize Nietzsche’s barbs, though much of what Nietzsche has to say transcends the milieu in which it was written, and many of his criticisms will resound with readers today…this translation, with its useful notes and introduction, certainly provokes and surprises.”—Jon Morris, Popmatters In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner transformed his ambitions. The genius of such thinkers and makers—the kind of genius that had emerged in ancient Greece—this alone was the touchstone for true understanding. But how was education to serve genius, especially in a modern society marked more and more by an unholy alliance between academic specialization, mass-market journalism, and the militarized state? Something more than sturdy scholarship was called for. A new way of teaching and questioning, a new philosophy...What that new way might be was the question Nietzsche broached in five vivid, popular public lectures in Basel in 1872. Anti-Education presents a provocative and timely reckoning with what remains one of the central challenges of the modern world. Paperback160 pagesNYRB Classics, 20155 x 0.4 x 8 inchesISBN 9781590178942Social Philosophy

Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

By Friedrich NietzscheEdited by Walter KaufmannReprint of the Helen Zimmern translationAfter kicking open the doors to twentieth-century philosophy in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche refined his ideal of the superman with the 1886 publication of Beyond Good and Evil. Conventional morality is a sign of slavery, Nietzsche maintains, and the superman goes beyond good and evil in action, thought, and creation. Nietzsche especially targets what he calls a "slave morality" that fosters herd-like quiescence and stigmatizes the "highest human types." In this path-breaking work, Nietzsche's philosophical and literary powers are at their height: with devastating irony and flashing wit he gleefully dynamites centuries of accumulated conventional wisdom in metaphysics, morals, and psychology, clearing a path for such twentieth-century innovators as Thomas Mann, André Gide, Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, André Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre, all of whom openly acknowledged their debt to him. Students of philosophy and literature as well as general readers will prize this rich sampling of Nietzsche's thought in an unabridged and inexpensive edition of one of the philosopher's most important works.Paperback176 pagesDover Publications, 1997Originally published in 18865.5 x 0.2 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780486298689Philosophy, Criticism

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

By Friedrich Nietzsche Introduction by Michael TannerTranslated by R.J. HollingdaleIn late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (1844-1900) set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome—Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ—and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his ‘forthcoming revelation of all values’. Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche’s main beliefs and is in every way his last testament.Paperback122 pages Penguin, 2004Originally published in 19087 x 0.3 x 10 inches ISBN 9780140445152Autobiographical, Philosophy, Existentialism

Ecce Homo

By Friedrich NietzscheIntroduction by R. Kevin HillEdited and Translated by R. Kevin Hill "God is dead; but given the ways of men, perhaps for millennia to come there will be caves in which his shadow will be shown"Friedrich Nietzsche described The Joyous Science as a book of 'exuberance, restlessness, contrariety and April showers'. As deeply personal and affirmative work, it straddles his middle and late periods and contains some of the most important ideas he would ever express in writing. Moving from a critique of conventional morality, the arts and modernity to an exhilarating doctrine of self-emancipation, this playful combination of aphorisms, poetry and prose is a treasure trove of philosophical insights, brought to new life in R.Kevin Hill's clear, graceful translation. Paperback 368 pages Penguin Classics, 2018Originally published in 18825.1 x 0.8 x 7.8 inches ISBN 9780141195391Philosophy, Existentialism

The Joyous Science

By Friedrich NietzscheEdited by Heinrich MannA prominent intellectual of the Weimar era, Heinrich Mann was a leading authority on Nietzsche. This volume consists of Mann's selections of highlights from the philosopher's works, along with an introduction that explains their significance to modern readers. Key excerpts from Nietzsche's books include passages from The Birth of Tragedy, Thoughts Out of Season, The Dawn of the Day, The Joyful Wisdom, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and The Will to Power. For ease of reference, Mann has arranged the text in sections corresponding to Nietzsche's views on science, philosophy, and truth; his critiques of culture—the use and abuse of history, Europeans and Germans, Wagner, the genealogy of morals, and nihilism; his concept of the world without God, including the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music, the true and the apparent world, and eternal recurrence; and his confessions. Paperback176 pagesDover Thrift Editions, 20065.4 x 0.4 x 8.4 inchesISBN 9780486451176Philosophy

The Essential Nietzsche

By Ritchie Robertson "Robertson's Friedrich Nietzsche is destined to become the best short introduction to the life and writings of the philosopher. Robertson is not a Nietzsche apologist; he faces squarely and honestly Nietzsche's shortcomings. . . But at the same time he recognizes Nietzsche's importance for the history of philosophy and his seminal role in challenging the assumptions and easy truths of his predecessors. This type of balanced and informed account is rare in Nietzsche scholarship, and Robertson's scrupulous incorporation of previous research and exceptionally lucid prose make this book all the more welcomed as an introductory study."—Robert C. Holub, Ohio Eminent Scholar, professor, and chair of German languages and literatures, The Ohio State University An accessible and informative study of the life and work of this vaunted German philosopher. In this concise yet comprehensive critical biography, Ritchie Robertson examines the work of Friedrich Nietzsche within the context of his life. The book traces Nietzsche’s development from outstanding classical scholar to cultural critic, who measured Imperial Germany by the standards of ancient Greece. It follows him on his path from a prophet (in the persona of Zarathustra) to a savage polemicist against modern liberal values, offering a “philosophy of the future.” Robertson argues that Nietzsche’s middle-period writings offer a subtle and searching analysis of his culture, more rewarding than the strident and often-controversial later works. The book also assesses Nietzsche’s claim to be continuing the Enlightenment and shows that he valued reason, evidence, and fact, without which his historical case against Christianity would make no sense.Paperback224 pages | 26 halftonesReaktion Books, 20225 x 7.75 inchesISBN 9781789146066Theory

Friedrich Nietzsche

By Friedrich NietzscheIntroduction by Peter GayTranslated and Edited by Walter KaufmannCommentary by Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Gilles Deleuze One hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche’s most important works, from his first book to his last: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Edited and translated by the great Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, this volume also features seventy-five aphorisms, selections from Nietzsche’s correspondence, and variants from drafts for Ecce Homo. It is a definitive guide to the full range of Nietzsche’s thought. Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide Paperback896 pagesModern Library, 20005.1 x 1.2 x 8 inchesISBN 9780679783398Philosophy, Existentialism, Anthology

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