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Unrecounted, 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."
- Susan Sontag

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.

"The images...set up a mysterious dialogue with the text, rather like the photos Sebald inserted into his novels."
- Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun

"A totally original book of poems...haunting, profound, nonsensical, surreal - at moments even painful."
- Robert Leiter, Jewish Exponent

"The drawings along with Sebald's text play with serious themes in a European tradition that has all but vanished."
- George Porcari, New York Arts

"An extraordinarily handsome edition of poems by the late great writer."
- Confrontation

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.

Date of publication: October 2007