The City and the World

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.



Gregor Hens is a German writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, and a literary translator. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught linguistics in the US for more than twenty years. He was a writer in residence at Magdalene College in Cambridge and has been shortlisted, with Rawi Hage, for the International Literature Prize (Berlin). He has notably translated Will Self and Kurt Vonnegut into German. Hens currently teaches Urban Studies and Creative Writing at the Free University in Berlin. His memoir Nicotine was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015.