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Unpacking My Library
Series: Penguin Archive
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Brief Description
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories. From intimate musings on his book collection to a dream-like trip through the bustling streets of...
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Description
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books
Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories.
From intimate musings on his book collection to a dream-like trip through the bustling streets of Marseille, each of these essays offers a compelling journey into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers.
Series: Penguin Archive
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An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cรฉsar Aira is part of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. It is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfoldโvast chasms, surreal plants and animals......Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Ecce Homo
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Ecce Homo No, I don't hate being black. I'm just tired of saying it's beautiful. No, I don't hate myself. I'm just tired of people bruising their knuckles on my jaw. A novella with the force of a screaming trumpet flare, Dambudzo Marechera's seminal literary debut explores a body and spirit...Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
How I Came to Know Fish
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Of all the sleep a man can have, the fisherman's sleep is the sweetest. It is the greatest of luxuries - sleep and fishing. Through tender, vivid, and often humorous recollections - from magical fishing trips to the rivers and ponds of Bustehrad to his charismatic father's eccentric business ventures -...Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Reflections in a Golden Eye
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain's wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Pendertonโunhappily married to the unfaithful Leonoraโin turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers'...Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Requiem
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life It is a hot July Sunday in Lisbon and our narrator has an appointment to meet someone by the quayside. But when his guest does not arrive, he spends the day wandering the deserted city, encountering some...Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Dreaming Child
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books As for me I have one ambition only- to invent stories, very beautiful stories Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen's short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal...Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Driver's Seat
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Muriel Spark claimed The Driver's Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Liseโheading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mindโyou will understand why.Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Umbrella
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The Umbrella evokes the delicate interplay of emotion and subtle storytelling. In the words of the author: "Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by...Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Tristessa
Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: 'a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City...Paperback$1700Elsewhere:$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Daemon Lover
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books It's terribly important that I get in touch with a gentleman who may have stopped in here to buy flowers this morning. Terribly important. Sometimes, the person you think you love isn't who they seem. And sometimes, you can be your own deception. Spanning Shirley Jackson's entire career, these devilish tales...Paperback$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Hop-Frog
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Edgar Allan Poe's short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilisingly terse sketcher of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original...Paperback$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Monkey King Makes Havoc in Heaven
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Wu Cheng'en's 16th-century novel Journey to the West is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese novels ever written. Here, in Julia Lovell's witty and charismatic translation, we meet one of its heroes - Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, whose powers include shape-shifting, immortality, and being incredibly rude. Though...Paperback$1799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780241747261
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 17 April 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 4.0mm
Width: 110.0mm
Height: 180.0mm
Weight: 63g
Pages: 96
About the Author
Walter Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892 to a German-Jewish family in Berlin. He was educated at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg and the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. An essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities published in 1924 earned him swift recognition but he struggled to find a position to support himself and build on its success. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Benjamin fled to Paris and became a prominent critic of Hitler's regime. During this period he worked on his immense study of 19th century Parisian life known as The Arcades Project (which was posthumously published in unfinished form).Following the Nazi invasion of France Benjamin attempted to escape to the United States where a visa had been obtained for him.Trying to get through to neutral Portugal, Benjamin was prevented from crossing the Spanish border and committed suicide on September 27 1940.
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Aesthetics and Politics
Delve into the profound and influential Marxist aesthetic debates that shaped the course of 20th-century intellectual history with Aesthetics and Politics. This seminal work assembles the pivotal texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art that took place between the 1930s and 1950s in German cultureโan era that witnessed an unparalleled tradition of major aesthetic discourse. The book...Paperback$2499Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips Monday -
One-Way Street and Other Writings
Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri; translated by J.A. Underwood Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including One-Way Street, his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; Unpacking My Library, a delightful meditation on book-collecting;...Paperback$2700Elsewhere:$3000Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips Monday -
The Storyteller
The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street, and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, delve into...Paperback$2499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Berlin Childhood around 1900
Completed in exile in Paris, as the Second World War was dawning, Walter Benjamin looks back at the city of his birth at the beginning of the century. Berlin Childhood around 1900 is both a sensory memoir of childhood as well as a tour of the iconic spaces of the city. These are expeditions into the depths of memory, moving...Hardback$3699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Understanding Brecht
The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht, both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices, continued to discuss, argue, and correspond on topics as varied...Paperback$2999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Correspondence 1930-1940
โWe must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon.โ So wrote Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly before he took his own life. The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, published...Paperback$3599Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
The Arcades Project
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labour their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen yearsโ"the theatre," as Benjamin called...Paperback$13400Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Unpacking My Library
"I fully realise that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust." Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the...Book$1499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings highlights one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century. Until now, only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has 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...Paperback$9900Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
One-Way Street
One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literatureโby turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a...Paperback$3999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Benjamin's famous Work of Art essay sets out his boldest thoughts on media and on culture in generalโin their most realised formโwhile retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay, the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought. This...Paperback$6599Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
On Photography
Walter Benjamin's essay A Short History of Photography (1931) made bold statements about photographic pioneers such as David Octavius Hill and Nicephore Niepce, and the social and historical context of their work. This first selection of Benjamin's writings on photography includes a new translation of this influential essay as well as a range of Benjamin's other writings, both published and...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks
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