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Book Cover for: Silent Catastrophes: Essays, W. G. Sebald

Silent Catastrophes: Essays

W. G. Sebald

From the renowned author of Austerlitz (named a Top 10 Book of the 21st Century by the New York Times) comes the first English translation of his extraordinary essays on the Austrian writers who shaped his life and work.

Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him: The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991.

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Nazi Germany, meant that concepts such as "home/land," "borderland" and "exile" occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald's own.

Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald's English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from "a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity" (The Guardian).

Book Details

  • Publisher: Random House
  • Publish Date: Mar 25th, 2025
  • Pages: 544
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.19in - 5.67in - 1.81in - 1.35lb
  • EAN: 9781400067725
  • Categories: EssaysEuropean - GermanSubjects & Themes - Places

About the Author

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz (named a Top 10 Book of the 21st Century by the New York Times), After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted, Campo Santo, and Silent Catastrophes among other publications.

More books by W. G. Sebald

Book Cover for: Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: Vertigo, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: Three Book Sebald Set: The Emigrants, the Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: After Nature, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: Campo Santo, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: Across the Land and the Water: Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, W. G. Sebald
Book Cover for: Unrecounted, W. G. Sebald