Unpacking my Library

The creation of this book fulfilled a lifelong dream of the author’s: to write his own version of Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” while reorganising his 10,000 volumes. A recent move to Manhattan occasioned taking stock of his possessions in a deeply personal way. This is a tale of uprooting, a series of meditations on place, time, and loss. In this course of this displacement, he explores memory and nostalgia as he encounters things from his past. Among them, the strangest and most intimate of interlocutors, with whom the book is co-authored: his first teddy bear. Allen S. Weiss teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University.