An entrancing avant-garde adventure at the dawn of the modern ageIn 1909, municipal authorities built an airfield in northern Italy and invited leading pilots to compete on it. The show attracted thousands of spectators--among them Giacomo Puccini and Gabriele d'Annunzio--and reporters, including, amazingly, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Luigi Barzini. Peter Demetz's sparkling new book tells the enchanting story of what happened in the air and on the ground before, dur...

Prague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews have lived and worked together for over a thousand years.

The towering twentieth century thinker delve into literature, philosophy, and his own life experience in this "extraordinary collection" ( Publishers Weekly).A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berl...

The acclaimed historian and author of Prague in Black and Gold shares a dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's capital under Nazi occupation.From 1939 to 1945, Czechoslovakia endured as a Nazi Protectorate. Peter Demetz lived in Prague at that time, designated a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories. In Prague in Danger, he joins his objective chronicle of the city under Germa...

Only recently available for the first time in English, Panorama is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I–era Bohemia of Josef’s youth, to a German boarding school fu...

A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism ...

Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of h...

Essays and reflections from one of the twentieth century's most original cultural critics, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt.Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht's epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study "T...

A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker.Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to "rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation." First published in 1938, this radical investig...

A motivational and inspirational guide to living in the twenty-first century—when every crisis feels like an existential crisis."An honest and moving book of self-help for readers generally disposed to loathe the genre." — The Wall Street JournalSøren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other towering figures of existentialism grasped that human beings are, at heart, moody creatures, susceptible...

We all want to be happy but what is happiness? Haim Shapira navigates the terrain of happiness, exploring and contemplating an eclectic range of theories and insights into the conflicts we face on our journey to creating our own happiness.What is your happiest moment? How can you know it? Do we waste time or does time waste us? Are questions about meaning truly meaningful? What’s really important? Drawing on literary and philosophical sources ranging from Alice in Wonderland and Th...

History comes alive in this textured account of the rivalry between Harry Houdini and the so-called Witch of Lime Street, whose iconic lives intersected at a time when science was on the verge of embracing the paranormal.The 1920s are famous as the golden age of jazz and glamour, but it was also an era of fevered yearning for communion with the spirit world, after the loss of tens of millions in the First World War and the Spanish-flu epidemic. A desperate search f...