Half-Life is a riveting new collection full of family dramas, global warming and conversations with Death. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, the Peloponnese, a Staffordshire village and home, engaging with the various beauties to be found in art, nature and the church. Then, in an extended sequence, Death relates stories of her encounters with the world's peoples and cultures."He writes with a controlled passion... using sophisticated effects to locate the sig...

The masterworks of W. G. Sebald, now in gorgeous new covers by the famed designer Peter MendelsundNew 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 shad...

The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time.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 ...

You only find true love once.When Werther dances with the beautiful Lotte, it seems as though he is in paradise. It is a joy, however, that can only ever be short-lived. Engaged to another man, she tolerates Werther's adoration and encourages his friendship. She can never return his love.Broken-hearted, he leaves her home in the country, trying to escape his own desire. But when he receives a letter telling him that she is finally married, his passion soon turns to destruct...

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "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"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Satur...

"A masterpiece."—Richard Eder, The New York Times.Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US, 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 the 1996 International Book of the Year. The poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, while the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is ...

From one of the undisputed masters of world literature, a haunting novel of sublime ambition and power about a man whose fragmentary memories of a lost childhood lead him on a quest across Europe in search of his heritage.Jacques Austerlitz is a survivor – rescued as a child from the Nazi threat. In the summer of 1939 he arrives in Wales to live with a Methodist minister and his wife. As he grows up, they tell him nothing of his origins, and he reaches adulthood with no understandi...

This collection, drawing on almost forty years of verse, represents the definitive guide to one of the leading English poets working today. It will allow the reader the chance to survey both the remarkable variety and the consistent quality of O’Brien’s work, as well as the enduring strength of his obsessions: these have helped create a tone and a landscape as immediately recognizable as those of MacNeice, Larkin or Eliot. O’Brien’s hells and heavens, underworlds and urban dystopias, train...

A tender work of mourning, this poetry collection—owing to the remembered words of a much-loved husband—recalls the author's life before marriage and considers a future after her husband's death. Imagining that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets, and her dependence on friends and children. At the center of these beautiful lyrics—written with complete control of rhythm and tone—it is a man, rather than grief, that appears clearly.

'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.' The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to tell the story of Werther, a young man tormented by his love for Lotte, a tender-hearted girl who is promised to someone else. Overwhelmed by his feelings, Werther begins to see only one way to escape from his anguish. Goethe's story of a s...

A “playful, witty, and entertaining” book (The New York Times Book Review) that offers an exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven—from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending.It's a hilariously revisionist account of Noah's ark, narrated by a passenger who doesn't appear in Genesis. It's a sneak preview of heaven. It encompass...

"A highly readable, sensitive, and lively Werther. Corngold is both faithful to the German and true to the demands of a modern English text" —Jeremy Adler, Times Literary SupplementA masterpiece of European imagination, The Sufferings of Young Werther is the classic Sturm und Drang tale of youthful angst and tragedy. The acclaimed translator Stanley Corngold brings new passion and precision to Goethe's timeless novel of obsessive love and madness ...