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The first-ever volume of the photographs of German writer W.G.
Sebald, exquisitely designed to shed new light on his creative
process, as it chronicles the images and encounters that shaped his
writing life. Shadows of Reality presents a unique, fully
illustrated catalogue of W.G. Sebald's photographs- an
extraordinary combination of film negatives, prints, and slides
from the University of East Anglia's photographic collection, the
Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, and the Sebald Estate.
Complementing the exhibition Lines of Sight- W.G. Sebald's East
Anglia and edited by literary scholar Clive Scott and photography
curator Nick Warr, this wonderfully comprehensive book covers the
multiple photographic facets of Sebald's published work and
includes a substantial amount of material that has not been made
public before. Introduced by Nick Warr, who offers an intriguing
overview of the author's critical relationship to photography,
Shadows of Reality also includes an illuminating interview with
Michael Brandon-Jones, the photographer who collaborated with
Sebald on all of his publications. The book features a collection
of extracts-principally on photography-from interviews with Sebald
himself, bequeathed to the archive of recordings held at the
University of East Anglia by his close friend Gordon Turner, who
also provides a memoir. Accompanying these are inspired essays by
Clive Scott and Angela Breidbach on Sebald's
writing-with-photographs and the complex and mercurial interactions
of those photographs with narrative design. A deeply important
collection for anyone interested in Sebald's creative processes or
the ways in which photography might serve fiction, Shadows of
Reality is an inexhaustible treasure trove of new discoveries and
revelations about the cherished international author.
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.
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Austerlitz (Paperback)
W. G. Sebald; Introduction by James Wood; Translated by Anthea Bell
1
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R389
R318
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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
writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald' Eileen
Battersby, Irish Times 'Greatness in literature is still possible'
John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the Year 'A work of obvious
genius' Literary Review 'A fusion of the mystical and the solid ...
His art is a form of justice - there can be, I think, no higher
aim' Evening Standard 'Spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art'
The Times Literary Supplement 'I have never read a book that
provides such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the
dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis'
Observer 'A great book by a great writer' Boyd Tonkin, Independent
W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944 and
died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in
Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position
as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and
settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of
European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the
author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz,
After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo,
Unrecounted, A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is
published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.
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Vertigo (Paperback)
W. G. Sebald; Translated by Michael Hulse
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R432
R356
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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.
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The Emigrants (Paperback)
W. G. Sebald; Translated by Michael Hulse
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R428
R352
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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.
A Walking tour through the haunted landscapes of the past, in the company of the exiled and the departed.The Rings of Saturn begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia. From Lowestoft to Southwold to Bungay, Sebald's own story becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present: of Chateau briand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. The result is a book unlike any other in contemporary literature, an intricately patterned and endlessly thought-provoking meditation on the transience of all things human.
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Austerlitz (Paperback)
W. G. Sebald; Introduction by James Wood; Translated by Anthea Bell
1
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R300
R245
Discovery Miles 2 450
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Austerlitz is W. G. Sebald's haunting novel of post-war Europe. 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
writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald' Eileen
Battersby, Irish Times 'Greatness in literature is still possible'
John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the Year 'A work of obvious
genius' Literary Review 'A fusion of the mystical and the solid ...
His art is a form of justice - there can be, I think, no higher
aim' Evening Standard 'Spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art'
The Times Literary Supplement 'I have never read a book that
provides such a powerful account of the devastation wrought by the
dispersal of the Jews from Prague and their treatment by the Nazis'
Observer 'A great book by a great writer' Boyd Tonkin, Independent
W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944 and
died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in
Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position
as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and
settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of
European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the
author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz,
After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo,
Unrecounted, A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is
published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.
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Unrecounted (Paperback)
W. G. Sebald; Translated by Michael Hamburger; Illustrated by Jan Peter Tripp; Contributions by Andrea Koehler, Hans Magnus Enzensberger
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R417
R355
Discovery Miles 3 550
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Unrecounted combines thirty-three of what W. G. Sebald called his
"micropoems" miniatures as unclassifiable as all of his works with
thirty-three exquisitely exact lithographs by one of his oldest
friends, the acclaimed artist Jan Peter Tripp. The lithographs
portray, with stunning precision, pairs of eyes the eyes of
Beckett, Borges, Proust Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon, Tripp, Sebald,
Sebald's dog Maurice. Brief as haiku, the poems are epiphanic and
anti-narrative. What the author calls "time lost, the pain of
remembering, and the figure of death" here find a small home. The
art and poems do not explain one another, but rather engage in a
kind of dialogue. "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter
Tripp," Sebald comments in his essay, "the better I understand that
behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is
concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak."
"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East
Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings
of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's
imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and
decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say
hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or
more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn - with its curious
archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as
countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics
inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's
"Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick
model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas
Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging
change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph
Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The
narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the
River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk
industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves
his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that
easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed
by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being
unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of
the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings
of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."
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."
In the last years of World War II, the Allies dropped a million
bombs on Germany. Yet the German people have been silent about the
resulting devestation and loss of life, failing to recognise the
terrible shadow that destruction from the air cast over their land.
Here W.G. Sebald asks why it is we turn our backs on the horrors of
war, and in addressing our response to the past, offers insights
into how we live now.
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Air Raid (Paperback)
Alexander Kluge, Martin Chalmers, W. G. Sebald
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R246
Discovery Miles 2 460
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A powerful work by the heralded writer, this collection is a
touchstone event in German literature of the post-war era. On April
8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their
German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As
it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than
two hundred bombers was diverted to nearby Halberstadt. A mid-sized
cathedral town of no particular industrial or strategic importance,
Halberstadt was almost totally destroyed, and a
then-thirteen-year-old Alexander Kluge watched his town burn to the
ground. Incorporating photographs, diagrams, and drawings, Kluge
captures the overwhelming rapidity and totality of the organized
destruction of his town from numerous perspectives, bringing to
life both the strategy from above and the futility of the response
on the ground. Originally published in German in 1977, this
exquisite report, fragmentary and unfinished, is one of Kluge's
most personal works and one of the best examples of his literary
technique. The English edition of Air Rair includes additional new
stories by the author and features an appreciation of the work by
W. G. Sebald. "More than a few of Kluge's many books are essential,
brilliant achievements. None are without great interest."-Susan
Sontag
This tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebald's celebrated
masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James
Wood. "Austerlitz" is the story of a man's search for the answer to
his life's central riddle. 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.
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
A Place in the Country is a window into the brilliant mind of W. G.
Sebald 'The greatest writer of our time' Peter Carey When W. G.
Sebald 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 to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where
Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration - Sebald
lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable
voice. 'A fascinating volume that confirms Sebald as one of
Europe's most mysterious and best-loved literary imaginations'
Evening Standard 'Sebald was in possession of the uncanny ability
to make his own intellectual obsessions, immediately, compulsively
his reader's' Observer 'Irresistible . . . an intimate anatomy of
the pathos, absurdity and perverse splendour of trying to find
patterns in the chaos of the world' Independent W . G. Sebald was
born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944 and died in December
2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg,
Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an
assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled
permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European
Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of
The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After
Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo,
Unrecounted and a selection of poetry, Across the Land and the
Water. Jo Catling taught German for a number of years alongside W.
G. Sebald at the University of East Anglia, where she is currently
a senior lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative
Writing.
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 work its magic, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.
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Vertigo (Paperback, New Ed)
W. G. Sebald; Translated by Michael Hulse
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R301
R246
Discovery Miles 2 460
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Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of this compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself. What could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka about a doomed huntsman and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona?
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Campo Santo (Paperback)
W. G. Sebald; Translated by Anthea Bell
2
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R299
R243
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Campo Santo is a collection of essays by W. G. Sebald When W.G.
Sebald died tragically in 2001 a unique voice was silenced. Campo
Santo is a collection of the pieces he left behind - none of them
previously published in book form - which provide a powerful
insight into the themes that came to dominate his life. Four pieces
pay tribute to Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and
present. Sebald also examines the works of writers such as Kafka,
Nabokov, and Gunter Grass, showing both how literature can provide
restitution for the injustices of the world and how such literature
came to have so great an influence on him. Campo Santo is a fitting
memorial to W.G. Sebald, who himself studied the shifting nature of
memory and time with such sensitivity. 'A precious addition to the
canon' Independent 'Will come to be seen as indispensable to an
understanding of his work' Sunday Times 'Full of a sense of
liberation and lightness ... these [pieces] abound in energy and
work the authentic Sebaldian magic' Literary Review 'We have become
suspicious, rightly, of claims for literary greatness, but in
Sebald's case the claim was triumphantly justified. He was, he is,
the real thing' John Banville, Guardian 'Sebald was probably the
greatest intellect and voice of the late twentieth century' Anthony
Beevor, The Times 'A writer whose explorations of time and memory
make him arguably the closest author modern European letters has to
rival Borges' Sunday Times W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im
Allgau, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied
German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and
Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer
at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England
in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University
of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of
Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History
of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, For Years Now and A Place
in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called
Across the Land and the Water.
Three men walk the pages of W. G. Sebald’s first literary work – the painter Mathias Grünewald, the botanist G. W. Steller and W. G. Sebald himself. Written as a long poem in three parts, After Nature delves into each of these lives in turn, teasing out the haunting uncertainties of the past and revealing the terrible burden that history places on all of our shoulders.
"A splendid addition to an already extraordinary oeuvre."--Teju
Cole, "The New Yorker"
German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of
"Austerlitz, "the prose classic of World War II culpability and
conscience that put its author in the company of Nabokov, Calvino,
and Borges. Now comes the first major collection of this literary
master's poems. Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, they range
from pieces Sebald wrote as a student in the sixties to those
completed right before his untimely death in 2001. In nearly one
hundred poems--the majority published in English for the first
time--Sebald explores his trademark themes, from nature and
history, to wandering and wondering, to oblivion and memory.
Soaring and searing, the poetry of W. G. Sebald is an indelible
addition to his superb body of work, and this collection is bound
to become a classic in its own right.
"How fortunate we are to have this writer's startling imagination
freshly on display once again, expressed in language honed to a
perfect simplicity."--Billy Collins
"A watershed volume . . . nothing less than
transcendent."--"BookPage"
" Sebald was] a defining writer of his era."--"The New Republic"
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