The Great Wall of China

by JorgeLuisBorges (Author), Daniel Schwartz (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $5.01

  Over many years and many journeys, Daniel Schwartz has patiently and meticulously photographed one of mankind's supreme monuments - the Great Wall of China. Schwartz was the first foreigner ever to be allowed such privileged access to the Wall. From the Yellow River westward he travelled through mountains and deserts and frozen grasslands to the borders of Central Asia. China's new policy of openness encouraged him recently to revisit the Wall and to photograph areas that had been closed to him on previous journeys. To place the photographs in context, the Chinese historian Luo Zhewen, who had dedicated his life to the study of the great wall, has written an essential brief history. Also included in Jorge Luis Borges's meditation 'The Wall and the Books' and an extract from Franz Kafka's short story 'The Great Wall of China'. This extraordinary project is at once a beautiful photographic essay, an intriguing conceptual art project, and a personal odyssey. Daniel Schwartz, with his prfound and haunting vision of the Great Wall, has made not only a unique document but a book that is a work of art in itself.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $6.07

  In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of good books for all'. Unpublished during his lifetime, the novels of Franz Kafka are now regarded as among the greatest works of early twentieth-century literature. His most famous and influential work, Metamorphosis, depicting a man who wakes up to discover he has been turned into an insect, was first published by Penguin in 1961. These lucid stories and brief fables describe the cruel absurdities he believed dominate human life.