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 1...

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 ...

The German novelist, poet and critic W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) has in recent years attracted a phenomenal international following for his evocative prose works such as Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn) and Austerlitz, spellbinding elegiac narratives which, through their deliberate blurring of genre boundaries and provocative use of photography, explore questions of Heimat and exile, memory and loss, history and natural history, art and nature. Sa...

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, essayis...

Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. The story follows Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new reality while maintaining relationships with his family. Kafka's celebrated story was first published in 1915.Sayre Street Books offers the world's greatest literature in easy to navigate, beautifully designed digital editions.

Containing entries on over four hundred authors of fiction, poetry and drama from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, this invaluable work of reference presents material of a range and depth that no other book on the subject in English attains. For the second edition, the entries have been updated to include the most recent works of German literature. A number of new entries have been added, dealing in particular with the East German literary scene and the changing literary landscape after r...

"Each [essay is] a model of clarity, weight, gravity . . . each superbly centered on the moods, manners, works . . . of ten exemplary men and women" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review)."Dark times" is Brecht's phrase, and Hannah Arendt uses it suggest that those she writes about are not "mouthpieces of the Zeitgeist", but, rather, that the routine repetitive horrors of the twentieth century form the substance of the dark against which their lives of illuminat...

This book investigates the crucial question of ‘restitution’ in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald’s oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics.Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Iris...

A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born."Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsme...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of arts and culture in Germany which produced many of the world's finest writers, artists, philosophers and composers. This volume, first published in 2004, offers students and specialists an authoritative introduction to that dazzling cultural phenomenon, now known collectively as German Romanticism. Individual chapters not only introduce the reader to individual writers such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, ...

**“[A] fascinating and accessible account . . . In his entertaining book, Mr. Eilenberger shows that his magicians’ thoughts are still worth collecting, even if, with hindsight, we can see that some performed too many intellectual conjuring tricks.” —Wall Street JournalA grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century**The year is 191...

Often regarded as the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) remains one of the most influential figures of European modernism. In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's...