The Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti all his life declared himself a “mortal enemy” of death—and here, in English at last, is his landmark book on the subject.

“I accept no death.”—Elias Canetti (1905–1994)

The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Elias Canetti’s powerful, disarming, and often bleakly comic observations, diatribes, musings, and commentaries on and against death. Evoking despair, melancholy, and fury, Canetti examines the inevitable demise of all beings—from the ant, the fish, and the worm to an executioner, a court painter, and a Greek god—while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Interspersed with material from philosophers and writers such as Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser, The Book Against Death is ultimately a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.

Canetti famously refused to die before he’d read all his obituaries and corrected them.

"Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti’s great strength… [He] is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words… His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness." — Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books

"Canetti invites—indeed, compels—judgment. His exacting presence honors literature." — George Steiner, New Yorker

"If death involves fixity, then life demands movement. The Book Against Death refuses finality by remaining forever on the cusp of transformation. It will await its final revision until the end of time. It can’t save all of us, as Canetti longed to, but there is a small portion of immortality to be found in it nonetheless. An unfinished book is the only thing I know of that never dies." — Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

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