A quartet of essays on great European cities from the groundbreaking thinker Georg Simmel
‘Vnice possesses the ambiguous beauty of adventure, floating rootlessly through life, like a torn flower borne on the sea’
Georg Simmel was a brilliant, groundbreaking thinker, whose wide-ranging lectures held audiences spellbound in turn-of-the-century Berlin and throughout Europe. The theories of this maverick ‘wandering-priest’ left their mark on a whole generation of philosophers, poets and sociologists, including Heidegger and Rilke.
The quartet of essays contained in this book includes dazzling portraits of Italy’s iconic cities of art and history, as well as Simmel’s hugely influential ‘The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit’, one of the most important analyses of urban life and the alienation of the individual ever written.
Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was one of the first generation of German sociologists and an acquaintance of Max Weber. His study of philosophy, his wide reading in history and the sciences and his astute criticism meant Simmel became a renowned intellectual in his lifetime. He was known for his illuminating lectures and rare gifts as a speaker, exploring topics including the effect of the modern metropolis on human psychology, the philosophy of history and the philosophy of money.
About the author
Will Stone, born 1966, is a poet, essayist and literary translator. His first poetry collection Glaciation (Salt, 2007), won the international Glen Dimplex Award for poetry in 2008. Shearsman Books has re-published his subsequent critically appraised collections. Will’s poetry translations include To the Silenced – Selected Poems of Georg Trakl (Arc, 2005) Emile Verhaeren Poems (Arc, 2013), Georges Rodenbach Poems (Arc, 2017) and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Life Poetry and Madness by Wilhelm Waiblinger (2018). Pushkin Press published his translation of Montaigne by Stefan Zweig in 2015, Messages from a Lost World – Europe on the Brink by Stefan Zweig in 2016 and The Art of the City – Rome, Florence, Venice by Georg Simmel in September 2018. Encounters and Destinies – A Farewell to Europe by Stefan Zweig and Surrender to Night – Collected Poems of Georg Trakl will be published in 2019. Will has contributed poems, translations, essays and reviews to a range of publications including The London Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, Apollo Magazine, the RA Magazine, The White Review, Poetry Review and Agenda.
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