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Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, here offers a quintessential selection from the wealth of his short writings. Remarkable for their uncommon candor and originality, these flashes of thought illuminate a half century of Canetti's existential and intellectual development. By turns enigmatic and profound, anguished and humorous, Canetti's concentrated reflections reveal his grand themes - the mystery of love, the meaninglessness of history, the ambiguity of language, the problem of power, mankind's savagery toward other living creatures. Canetti's hatred of dogma, his passionate protest against aging and death stand out with unparalleled clarity, as does the deep ethical awareness at the core of his creativity. An autobiography stripped bare, a self-portrait of a mind, The Agony of Flies, presented in a bilingual edition, provides privileged insight into the life and thought of "one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius" (Iris Murdoch).