Description: Threading memoir and personal reflections with travelogue, philosophy, photography and references from a wide variety of writers and thinkers, The City and the World is a captivating, illuminating and expansive journey into the heart of the modern city.
In The City and the World Gregor Hens considers the phenomenon of the contemporary city and our place within it. Hens travels the world - from Berlin to Las Vegas to Shenzen, from Cologne to Santiago de Chile to Paris - reading, walking and swimming, asking how we perceive the city and how it may perceive us.
Brief description: Gregor Hens, born in 1965, is a German writer and translator. He has notably translated Will Self, Jonathan Lethem and George Packer into German. The City and the World is his second book to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Review Quotes:
'If Nicotine has a literary progenitor I would say that it is In Search of Lost Time ... an extraordinary act of literary finesse ... [with] tinkling little notes of comedy ... [a] dark, lovely, funny book.'
-- Joan Acocella, New Yorker (praise for Nicotine)
'[W]hen Nicotine stays dry, earthy and combustible, like a Virginia tobacco blend, it has a lot to say and says it well.'
-- Dwight Garner, New York Times (praise for Nicotine)
'A satisfying wisp of an essay about tobacco, addiction, first cigarettes, last cigarettes, breathing, kissing, hypnosis, literature, memory, and marking time ... Nicotine is a smoke ring, blown perfectly in a single puff, or - better? - a wafting trail of vapor. Will Self contributes a foreword, a rapid monologue punctuated with vigorous little twists, as though he were grinding out a stub with yellow-stained fingers.'
-- Christine Smallwood, Harper's (praise for Nicotine)