This image is the cover for the book Secret Heart of the Clock

Secret Heart of the Clock

From one of the preeminent intellectual figures of the twentieth century, a highly personal testimonial of what Canetti himself chooses to term "notations," bits and pieces: notes, aphorisms, fragments. Taken together, they present an awesomely tender, guiltily gloomy meditation on death and aging.

" A mosaical portrait of an old body's mind determined to do its exercises and not lose a step--and fascinating for that." - Kirkus Reviews

Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was born in 1905 into a Sephardi Jewish family in Ruse, Bulgaria. He moved to Vienna in 1924, where he became involved in literary circles while studying for a degree in chemistry. He remained in Vienna until the Anschluss, when he emigrated to England and later to Switzerland, where he died in 1994. In 1981, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas, and artistic power.” His books include Crowds and Powers, Auto-da-Fe, and a trilogy of memoirs.

Joel Agee has translated Elias Canetti, Friedrich Dürenmatt, Gottfried Benn, and a collection of Rilke's letters, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence. He won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, a verse play. He is the author of Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and lives in Brooklyn.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux