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W.G. Sebald W.G. Sebald was born Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps in 1944. From 1975 he taught at the University of East Anglia, became Professor of German in 1986, and was the first director of the British Centre for Translation. He won the Berlin Literature, Literatur Nord, and Mörike Prizes, as well as the Johannes Bobrowski medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction (The Rings of Saturn). New Directions was his first American publisher. He died in an automobile accident in Norfolk, England, near his home in Norwich in East Anglia, on December 14, 2001.
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Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald; translated from the German by Michael Hulse "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . . . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit." - Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review The Rings of Saturn was shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction. |
"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."
"This German who has lived
in England for over thirty years is one of the most mysteriously sublime
of contemporary writers. . . . And here, in The Rings of Saturn,
is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants." |
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The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald; translated from the German by Michael Hulse "W.G. Sebald has written
an astonishing masterpiece: it seems perfect while being unlike any
book one has ever read. Bewitching in its subtlety, subtle in its directness
and in the grandeur of its subject, The Emigrants is an irresistible
book." |
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Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US and sold out immediately in its first hardcover edition, The Emigrants has been acclaimed as "one of the best novels to appear since World War II" (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and three times chosen as the1996 International Book of the Year. In this poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at first appear to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of several Jewish exiles in England, Austria, and America. The narrator literally follows their footsteps, studding each story with photographs and creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album. But gradually, Sebald's prose, which combines documentary description with almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts a new magic, and the four stories merge into one. Illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs.
"A profound and original
work . . . W.G. Sebald has created an end-of-century meditation that
explores the most delicate, most painful, most nervously repressed and
carefully concealed lesions of the last hundred years. Illuminatingly
engaged with the history and literature of the modern era, Mr. Sebald's
book gains power through its poetic obsessions with the past." "The German novelist and
scholar W.G. Sabald has written a haunting and limitlessly suggestive
look about the most terrible example in our memory." |
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Vertigo by W.G. Sebald; translated from the German by Michael Hulse Vertigo is the third novel New Directions has published by W.G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. "Think of W.G. Sebald as
memory's Einstein." |
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Vertigo, W.G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald -- the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness -- takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts -- Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."
"For all its dark contents
and burden of undeclared grief, Vertigo is dizzyingly light
and transparent." |
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by W.G. Sebald; translated from the German by Michael Hamburger; with lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp A keepsake of one of the greatest writers of our time, Unrecounted comes as an unexpected gift to all the readers who loved W.G. Sebald. "The magic of W.G. Sebald's
incandescent body of work continues to unfold, with this unexpected
collaboration." |
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W.G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp were friends from their schooldays. Unrecounted combines 33 of what W.G. Sebald called his "micro-poems"—miniatures as unclassifiable as all his works—with 33 lithographs by the acclaimed artist Jan Peter Tripp. The art and the poems do not explain one another, but rather engage in a kind of dialog. "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." The lithographs portray with stunning exactness pairs of eyes: among them the eyes of Beckett, Borges, Proust, Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon, Tripp, and Sebald. The poems are anti-narrative, epiphanic and brief as haiku. What the author calls "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death" here find a small home.
"A totally original book
of poems...haunting, profound, nonsensical, surreal - at moments even
painful." "The drawings along with
Sebald's text play with serious themes in a European tradition that
has all but vanished." "An extraordinarily handsome
edition of poems by the late great writer." |
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©2008 by New Directions
Publishing Corp. |
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