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‘Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century’ The Times What begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human. ‘A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas... Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears’ Teju Cole, Guardian
A classic novel of post-war Europe, haunting and timelessly beautiful 'The greatest writer of our time' Peter Carey In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before. Austerlitz is W.G. Sebald's melancholic masterpiece. 'Mesmeric, haunting and heartbreakingly tragic. Simply no other wri...
This volume provides a dissection of W.G. Sebald's fiction and his acclaim. A German writer who taught in England for 30 years, he published four novels, first in German and then in English. His work gained even greater acclaim after his death in 2001, just months after the publication of his title Austerlitz.
'A book of excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation... I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at the end of European civilization' Susan Sontag At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss. 'An unconsoling masterpiece... Exquisitely written and exquisitely translated...a true work of art' Spectator
A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund Perfectly titled, Vertigo —W.G. Sebald's marvelous first novel — is a work that teeters on the edge: compelling, puzzling, and deeply unsettling. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys accross Europe to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, the narrator draws the reader, line by line, into a dizzying web of history, biography, legends, literature, and — most perilously — memories.
Uses the problem of modernity to explore various themes in Sebald's work.
In this first, collection of essays on W. G. Sebald to appear in English, newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars offer interdisciplinary perspectives on his work, providing a thorough assessment of his achievement.
A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands 'Spectacular' Observer 'A remarkable portrait' Guardian W. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew ...
Summary: "W.G. Sebald, frequently mentioned in the same breath as Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov, is one of the most important European writers of recent decades. He has been lauded by such major cultural commentators as Susan Sontag and Paul Auster, and he has combined wide public appeal with universal critical acclaim. His work is concerned with questions of memory, exile, representation, and, above all else, history. But his approach to history is strikingly different from conventional historiographical writing on the one hand, and from the historical novel on the other. His texts are hybrid in nature, mixing fiction, biography, historiography, travel-writing and memoir, and incorporating numerous photographic images. This volume seeks to respond to the complexities of Sebaldʼs image of history by presenting essays by a team of international scholars, all of whom are acknowledged Sebald experts. It offers a unique and exciting perspective on the dazzling work of one of the major literary figures of our times."--Publisher description.
From the author of the critically-acclaimed Austerlitz and Across the Land and Water comes A Place in the Country, the much anticipated translation of one of W.G. Sebald's most brilliant works. When W. G. Sebald, the prize-winning author of Austerlitz, travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jan Peter Tripp. Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place - as when he journeys ...