Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926

First edition in English. Pp. [vii], 519, [1]. Black cloth-covered boards, stamped in silver and blue foil to spine; black end papers. B/w Illus., notes, note on text, chronology, index.

Vol. I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Originally published in 1996, this work is a translation of selections culled out of Walter Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften. Fully five-sixths of the material has never before been translated into English.

This 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". "This feast of a book [is] sumptuous." –George Steiner, The Observer