To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays
Written by Czeslaw Milosz
Edited and with an Introduction by Bogdana Carpenter & Madeline G. Levine

To Begin Where I Am is the most complete one-volume edition of Czeslaw Milosz's prose writings available in English. Spanning more than half a century of his work, the essays, several of which have never before been translated, present Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple guises. His extraordinary thematic breadth and his command of a diversity of styles and genres are displayed throughout this collection: the incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of Communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape.

Erudite and eloquent, provocative and persuasive, To Begin Where I Am stands as a compelling introduction to one of the greatest writers of our time.

"A giant elusive in our midst."
JOHN UPDIKE, The New Yorker

"To Begin Where I Am bears witness to Milosz's lifetime of toil in the fields of memory, faith, and art."
ADAM KIRSCH, Bookforum

CZESLAW MILOSZ was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania in 1911. A witness to the devastation of Lithuania and Poland by the Nazi and Stalinist tides, he survived World War II in German-occupied Warsaw with his wife, Janina, publishing in the underground press. After the war he was stationed as a cultural attache from Poland in New York, Washington, and Paris; he defected to France in 1951. In 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California at Berkeley. Milosz received the 1978 Neustadt International Prize in Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Krakow, Poland, in 2004.

Publishing House: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2002
SoftCover book measuring 5.5" x 8.25"
462 pages
English Language Version

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