Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including "One-Way Street", his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; "Unpacking My Library", a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional "Hashish in Marseille"; and, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age. It contains: "Unpacking My Library"; "One-Way Street"; "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; "Brief History of Photography"; "Hashish in Marseille"; "On the Critique of Violence"; "The Job of the Translator"; "Surrealism"; "Franz Kafka"; and, "Picturing Proust".
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Walter Bendix Schonflies Benjamin (1892 -- 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.
