Download or read book Austerlitz written by W.G. Sebald and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.

Download or read book The Emigrants written by W. G. Sebald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories, documents, and diaries of the Holocaust, he collects photographs—the enigmatic snapshots which stud The Emigrants and bring to mind family photo albums. Sebald combines precise documentary with fictional motifs, and as he puts the question to realism, the four stories merge into one unfathomable requiem.

Download or read book Three Book Sebald Set The Emigrants The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo written by W. G. Sebald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The masterworks of W. G. Sebald, now in gorgeous new covers by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund New Directions is delighted to announce beautiful new editions of these three classic Sebald novels, including his two greatest works, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. All three novels are distinguished by their translations, every line of which Sebald himself made pitch-perfect, slaving to carry into English all his essential elements: the shadows, the lambent fallings-back, nineteenth-century Germanic undertones, tragic elegiac notes, and his unique, quiet wit.

Download or read book After Nature written by W.G. Sebald and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Nature, W. G. Sebald’s first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind’s place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, “an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance.” The first figure is the great German Re-naissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages. After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.

Download or read book The Rings of Saturn written by W. G. Sebald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."

Download or read book Reading W G Sebald written by Deane Blackler and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2007 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daring new view of Sebald's works and the reading practice they call forth. W. G. Sebald was born in 1944 in Germany. He found his way as a young academic to England and a career as professor of German. Only between the late 1980s and his untimely death in 2001 did he concentrate on nonacademic writing, crafting a new kind of prose work that shares features with but remains distinct from the novel, essay, travel writing, and memoir forms and gaining elevation to the first rank of writers internationally. No less a critic than Susan Sontag was moved to ask "Is literary greatness still possible?," implying that it was and that she had found it embodied in his writing. Deane Blackler explores Sebald's biography before analyzing the reading practice his textscall forth: that of a "disobedient reader," a proactive reader challenged to question the text by Sebald's peculiar use of poetic language, the pseudoautobiographical voice of his narrators, the seemingly documentary photographs he inserted into his books, and by his exquisite representations of place. Blackler reads Sebald's fiction as adventurous and disobedient in its formulation, an imaginative revitalization of literary fiction for the third millennium. Deane Blackler received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2005 from the University of Tasmania.

Download or read book The Lay of the Land written by Richard Ford and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-10-24 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter brings back the unforgettable Frank Bascombe in this astonishing meditation on modern-day America. A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father—Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a post-nuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms “the Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time. Also available in the Bascombe Trilogy: The Sportswriter and Independence Day

Download or read book Vertigo written by W. G. Sebald and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Speak Silence written by Carole Angier and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 him and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier from Sebald's birth as a second-generation German at the end of the Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and paradoxical ruthlessness, saving humour, and an elusive mix of fact and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique, ferociously original portrait.

Download or read book A Place in the Country written by W.G. Sebald and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Place in the Country is W. G. Sebald’s meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind—and the last of this great writer’s major works to be translated into English. This edition includes more than 40 pieces of art, all originally selected by W. G. Sebald. This extraordinary collection of interlinked essays about place, memory, and creativity captures the inner worlds of five authors and one painter. In his masterly and mysterious style—part critical essay, part memoir—Sebald weaves their lives and art with his own migrations and rise in the literary world. Here are people gifted with talent and courage yet in some cases cursed by fragile and unstable natures, working in countries inhospitable or even hostile to them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is conjured on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, hiding from his detractors on the island of St. Pierre, where two centuries later Sebald took rooms adjacent to his. Eighteenth-century author Johann Peter Hebel is remembered for his exquisite and delicate nature writing, expressing the eternal balance of both the outside world and human emotions. Writer Gottfried Keller, best known for his 1850 novel Green Henry, is praised for his prescient insights into a Germany where “the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider.” Sebald compassionately re-creates the ordeals of Eduard Mörike, the nineteenth-century German poet beset by mood swings, depression, and fainting spells in an increasingly shallow society, and Robert Walser, the institutionalized author whose nearly indecipherable scrawls seemed an attempt to “duck down below the level of language and obliterate himself” (and whose physical appearance and year of death mirrored those of Sebald’s grandfather). Finally, Sebald spies a cognizance of death’s inevitability in painter Jan Peter Tripp’s lovingly exact reproductions of life. Featuring the same kinds of suggestive and unexplained illustrations that appear in his masterworks Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, and translated by Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling, A Place in the Country is Sebald’s unforgettable self-portrait as seen through the experiences of others, a glimpse of his own ghosts alongside those of the men who influenced him. It is an essential addition to his stunning body of work. Praise for A Place in the Country “Measured, solemn, sardonic . . . hypnotic . . . [W. G. Sebald’s] books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review “In Sebald’s writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death. The scholarly craft of gathering scattered sources and weaving them into a coherent whole is transformed here into something beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald’s strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate “Magnificent . . . The multiple layers surrounding each essay are seamless to the point of imperceptibility.”—New York Daily News “Sebald’s most tender and jovial book.”—The Nation “Reading [A Place in the Country is] like going for a walk with a beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”—New York

Download or read book Understanding W G Sebald written by Mark Richard McCulloh and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Disaster Was My God written by Bruce Duffy and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Rimbaud burst onto the literary scene in 1871 with a startling new voice, transforming himself from an anonymous country boy into the sensation of Paris. His explosive life included a passionate affair with the older (and married) poet Paul Verlaine, and a prosperous career as a trader and arms dealer in Ethiopia. A cancerous leg forced him to return to France, where he died at the age of thirty-seven. Bruce Duffy takes these astonishing facts and brings them to vivid life in a story rich with humor, exquisite writing, and alarming parallels to our own contemporary moment. Disaster Was My God vividly conveys, as few works ever have, the inner turmoil of this calculating genius, and helps us understand why Rimbaud’s work and life continue to influence protean rock legends, from Bob Dylan to Patti Smith.

Download or read book The Emergence of Memory written by W.G. Sebald and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven, the literary world mourned the loss of a writer whose oeuvre it was just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, award-winning translator and author Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the writer, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation. With contributions from poet, essayist, and translator Charles Simic, New Republic editor Ruth Franklin, Bookworm radio host Michael Silverblatt, and more, The Emergence of Memory offers Sebald’s own voice in interviews between 1997 up to a month before his death in 2001. Also included are cogent accounts of almost all of Sebald’s books, thematically linked to events in the contributors’ own lives. Contributors include Carole Angier, Joseph Cuomo, Ruth Franklin, Michael Hofmann, Arthur Lubow, Tim Parks, Michael Silverblatt, Charles Simic, and Eleanor Wachtel.

Download or read book W G Sebald written by Uwe Schütte and published by Writers and Their Work. This book was released on 2018 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "W. G. Sebald was a literary phenomenon: a German literary scholar working in England, who took up creative writing out of dissatisfaction with German post-war letters. Within only a few years, his unique prose books made him one of the most celebrated authors of the late twentieth-century. This...critical introduction...highlights Sebald's double role as writer and academic. It discusses his oeuvre in the order in which his works were published in German in order to offer a deeper understanding of the original development of his literary writings"--publisher's website.

Download or read book Sebald s Vision written by Carol Jacobs and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. G. Sebald's writing has been widely recognized for its intense, nuanced engagement with the Holocaust, the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII, and other episodes of violence throughout history. Through his inventive use of narrative form and juxtaposition of image and text, Sebald's work has offered readers new ways to think about remembering and representing trauma. In Sebald's Vision, Carol Jacobs examines the author's prose, novels, and poems, illuminating the ethical and aesthetic questions that shaped his remarkable oeuvre. Through the trope of "vision," Jacobs explores aspects of Sebald's writing and the way the author's indirect depiction of events highlights the ethical imperative of representing history while at the same time calling into question the possibility of such representation. Jacobs's lucid readings of Sebald's work also consider his famous juxtaposition of images and use of citations to explain his interest in the vagaries of perception. Isolating different ideas of vision in some of his most noted works, including Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, and After Nature, as well as in Sebald's interviews, poetry, art criticism, and his lecture Air War and Literature, Jacobs introduces new perspectives for understanding the distinctiveness of Sebald's work and its profound moral implications.

Download or read book W G Sebald written by Jonathan James Long and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses the problem of modernity to explore various themes in Sebald's work.

Download or read book W G Sebald written by Jonathan James Long and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Likened to Proust, Gunter Grass, and Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) is one of the most important writers of our time, combining a wide readership with universal critical acclaim. Sebald's refracted and sometimes alienated views of both his native Germany and his adopted English homeland have had astonishing resonance in the German- and English-speaking worlds. In this first collection to appear in English, newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars offer interdisciplinary perspectives on Sebald's work, providing a thorough assessment of his achievement. Sebald's texts deal with issues that lie at the very heart of contemporary culture: memory, exile, identity, representation, history, the Holocaust. His texts are hybrid in nature, mixing fiction, biography, historiography, travel writing, and memoir, and incorporating numerous photographic images. In response to this, W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion focuses on the key areas of travel, intertextuality, nature, and memory. Introductory chapters situate Sebald's work within the European literary tradition and within contemporary critical discourse. Individual chapters then draw on approaches from cultural and literary studies, including ecocriticism, trauma theory, and text-image studies, in order to explore aspects of Sebald's dazzling oeuvre. A comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources rounds off the volume, which will satisfy a growing need for a high-quality and up-to-date guide to Sebald's work for an English-speaking readership. The interdisciplinary nature of the Companion means that it will appeal not only to students and critics working on Sebald, but to anyone interested in contemporary culture.