Elias Canetti was born in 1905 into a Sephardi Jewish family in Ruse, Bulgaria. He moved to Vienna in 1924, where he became involved in literary circles while studying for a degree in chemistry. He remained in Vienna until the Anschluss, when he emigrated to England and later to Switzerland, where he died in 1994. In 1981, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, and artistic power." His best-known works include his trilogy of memoirs The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes; the novel Auto-da-Fé; and the nonfiction book Crowds and Power.

IntroductionA Note on the ContentsPart I: Notes and Memoirs1. From Notes from Hampstead: The Writer's Notes, 1954-19712. From The Tongue Set Free, Part I: "Ruschuk, 1905-1911"3. From Notes from Hampstead4. From The Tongue Set Free, Part II: "Manchester, 1911-1913"Part II: Auto-da-Fé5. From Auto-da-Fé, Part I: "A Head Without a World"6. From Notes from Hampstead7. From Auto-da-Fé, Part II: "Headless World"Part III: Memoirs and Senses8. From The Torch in My Ear, Part II: "Storm and Compulsion" (Vienna, 1924-1925)9. From Earwitness: Fifty Characters10. From The Play of the Eyes, Parts III and IV: "Chance" and "Grinzing"11. From The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a VisitPart IV: Crowds and Power12. From The Torch in My Ear, Part III: "The School of Hearing" (Vienna, 1926-1928)13. From Crowds and Power: "The Crowd"14. From Crowds and Power: "The Entrails of Power"15. From Crowds and Power: "The Survivor"16. From The Human Province, The Secret Heart of the Clock, and The Agony of Flies: Notes, 1942-1993Part V: Death and Transformation17. "The Profession of the Poet"18. From Das Buch gegen Tod [The Book Against Death]

"A brilliant selection . . . Canetti's range astonishes." -Claire Messud, Harper'sA career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen.He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison, he never killed anyone. He neither won nor lost a fortune. All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought.Here, in his own words, is one of the twentieth century's foremost chroniclers: a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably peripatetic writer named Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole is a summa of Canetti's life and thought, and the definitive introduction to a writer whose genius for interpreting world-historical changes was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an abiding skepticism about the knowability of the self. Born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti later lived in Austria, England, and Switzerland while traversing, in writing, the great thematic provinces of his time: politics, identity, mortality, and more. Sourced from Canetti's landmark texts, including Crowds and Power, an analysis of authoritarianism and mobs; Auto-da-Fé, a darkly comic, daringly modernist novel about the fate of European literature; the famous sequence of sensory-titled memoirs, including The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear; and never-before-translated writings such as the posthumous The Book Against Death, this collection assembles its luminous shards into the fullest portrait yet of Canetti's remarkable achievement.Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen (Book of Numbers, The Netanyahus), I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole leads us from Canetti's polyglot childhood to his mature preoccupations, and his friendships and rivalries with Hermann Broch, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and others. This collection is also interspersed with aphorisms and diary entries, revealing Canetti's formal range and stylistic versatility in flashes of erudition and introspective humor. Throughout, we come to see Canetti's restless fascination with the instability of identity as one of the keys to his thought-as he reminds us, It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.