About this item
Highlights
- In The City and the World, Gregor Hens explores the city in the twenty-first century - a space we shape and are shaped by in turn - and our place within it.
- About the Author: Gregor Hens is a German writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, and a literary translator.
- 330 Pages
- Literary Collections, Essays
Description
About the Book
In The City and the World Gregor Hens threads memoir with travelogue, philosophy, photography and references from a wide variety of writers and thinkers to consider the phenomenon of the contemporary city and our place within it.
Book Synopsis
In The City and the World, Gregor Hens explores the city in the twenty-first century - a space we shape and are shaped by in turn - and our place within it. Travelling from Berlin to Las Vegas, Shenzhen to Santiago de Chile, he moves through these pulsing, ever-expanding cityscapes, reading, walking, swimming, riding the metro and catching the bus, bearing witness to the strange vitality of urban life. Everywhere, catalysts for new understandings emerge. Pushing his young daughter's pram turns Berlin upside-down. Students' exercises in getting lost and reorienting themselves throw into question notions of centre and periphery. Google Maps becomes an unexpected gallery, offering new ways of encountering art and architecture. Buildings hold their own histories and secrets, illuminated by chroniclers of Hens's cities, from Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec to Rem Koolhaas and Valeria Luiselli. Even libraries become cities in their own right. Blending memoir, travelogue and philosophy with photography and literary insights, The City and the World is a witty, captivating, illuminating and expansive journey into the heart of the modern city.
Review Quotes
'Whether walking, swimming or reading, Hens is an inspiring guide and a patient teacher. I love the way he sees the world, as and in its cities.'
-- Jon Day, author of Homing
'Gregor Hens combines memories and reflections, reportage and theory to create an impressive book about the phenomenon of the city.... The appeal of the book, however, lies not in the diversity of the topics addressed, but in the seemingly effortless and almost somnambulistic way in which Hens combines his own memories and reflections, reportage and theory.'
-- FAZ
'This book is a blessing.... In a mixture of essay, autobiographical recollection and dream travelogue, the Cologne-born author takes us into all these exciting storehouses of stories and history in his richly illustrated book.'
-- RND
'This is the driving principle of his book: by virtue of his imagination, his sensibility and his readings, the author succeeds in spinning a web whose individual threads touch and extend into the distance.'
-- Deutschlandradio Kultur
About the Author
Gregor Hens is a German writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, and a literary translator. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught linguistics in the US for more than twenty years. He was a writer in residence at Magdalene College in Cambridge and has been shortlisted, with Rawi Hage, for the International Literature Prize (Berlin). He has notably translated Will Self and Kurt Vonnegut into German. Hens currently teaches Urban Studies and Creative Writing at the Free University in Berlin. His memoir Nicotine was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015.