The City and the World E-Book

Gregor Hens

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

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‘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

‘The appeal of the book ... 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.’

— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘This book is a blessing.... In a mixture of essay, autobiographical recollection and travelogue, the Cologne-born author takes us into various exciting storehouses of stories and history in his richly illustrated book.’

— RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland 

Praise for Nicotine

‘Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked now seems, in retrospect, like little more than preparation for this remarkable essay – though nothing in me could have anticipated its exquisitely surprising brilliance, the precision and play of its intellect. It’s about smoking, sure, but it’s also a luminous and nuanced exploration of how we’re constituted by our obsessions, how our memories arrange themselves inside of us, and how – or if – we control our own lives.’ 

— Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters 

‘[An] elegant, lucid and consistently entertaining memoir (or essay; or prose work; or 150-odd-page long extended plume of smoke; it is punctuated by black-and-white photos, à la W. G. Sebald, which on the page look as though they have been captured through a veil of the stuff).’ 

— Nick Lezard, Spectator3

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THE CITY AND THE WORLD

GREGOR HENS

Translated by JEN CALLEJA

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‘Am I here, or am I there?’

— Virginia Woolf

‘Siquidem mundus duraverit.’

— Johannes Kepler8

Contents

Title PageEpigraphIOEUROPAGANYMEDECALLISTOImage CreditsReading ListAcknowledgementsTranslator AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorsCopyright

9From a garden in New Hampshire, I observed Jupiter’s moons. I could see Io creeping towards the gas giant’s surface, Europa emerging from its shadow to meet the retrograde Ganymede, the icy world of sparkling Callisto reaching deep into the blackness of space. All of this made it clear to me, clearer than ever, that the place in which we find ourselves is a mobile one, and I realized that we must determine our position every day anew. We calculate the orbits of the planets, read maps and coordinates, look for fixed stars and galaxies and use telescopes and sextants to cling to time measured in light years.

Perhaps we ought to close our eyes for a moment in order to feel the centrifugal and gravitational forces to which we are exposed as we turn our gaze inward and embark on a journey that is, by its very nature, fantastical. It might lead us across the vast sea and through the desert, to distant lands and to the highest peaks, but above all to the heaven-born cities of this world, which show us their wonders every day afresh.10