Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin’s lifetime, one of his “large-scale defeats.” Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered “final version” that contains the author’s own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin’s recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin’s West End at the turn of the century becomes an occasion for unified “expeditions into the depths of memory.” In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child—a collector, flâneur, and allegorist in one. This book is also one of Benjamin’s great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood—the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis. It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.

As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin’s attempt to do philosophy concretely.

Graffiti-covered industrial concrete ruins are all that remain today to remind us of the lives, adventures, and human relationships that once animated Bauer, Utah. Located just south of Tooele, across the Oquirrh Mountains west of the Salt Lake Valley, Bauer was abandoned in 1979 and declared a toxic waste site. The Book of Bauer: Stories from a Forgotten Town brings it back to life, evoking mid-twentieth century family and community in that company town as seen through the eyes of an observant adolescent boy.

Presenting a dramatic snapshot of life in Bauer in narrative autobiographical form, the book recalls the fate of hundreds of derelict mining towns throughout the mountain and sagebrush West. With vivid prose and intimate observation, The Book of Bauer offers an unparalleled memoir of small-town life in Utah and the Great Basin.

This will stand as the definitive account of Robert Browning's development to maturity as a man and poet. Drawing on all available material, including important new manuscript findings, John Maynard reconstructs the circumstances of Browning's youth—his ancestry, his attractive and eccentric family, life in the new suburban London, his early understanding of himself and the world around him, his rich cultural education at home and with his teachers and friends and gives us a warm and convincing picture of Browning's boyhood and growth. Maynard traces Browning's early efforts to define his role as a poet, providing a full critical interpretation of his relation to the Romantics, especially the peculiarly powerful influence Shelley exerted on his early work.

The development of Browning's mind is examined in his response to his early schooling and private tutoring at home, his year at the new London University, and his decision to drop out of the university and all conventional career plans. The history concludes with a survey of Browning's reading in the period of self-education that initiated his mature work as a major poet of our modern era. Maynard's intention throughout is not to provide a day-to-day account of a boy and young man's life, but to flesh out the larger epic of a gifted child's formation in his environment, and the emergence of his own direction out of the context of his family, society, and literary culture. In so doing he has achieved a model case study of the development of a young man's mind and of a young poet's sense of identity as a creative artist. And he has recaptured the social, physical, and cultural ambiance of middle-class London in the early nineteenth century. It is a story told with grace and critical good sense.