The Emigrants

Literature & Fiction

W.G. Sebald

Genre Fiction

Vintage

The Rings Of Saturn

Essays & Correspondence

Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction explores German writers' silence about a moment of mass destructionIn the last years of World War II, a million tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on one hundred and thirty-one German towns and cities. Six hundred thousand civilians died, and three and a half million homes were destroyed. When it has cast such a very dark shadow over his life and work, Sebald asks, how have so many writers allowed themselves to write it out of their experience and avoid articulating the horror W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction sparked a wide-ranging debate in the German press.'Sebald makes exquisite art out of vile history' Boyd Tonkin, Independent'One of the most important writers of our time' A.S. Byatt, New Statesman 'Demands to be read for its grand emotional power ... it absorbs and horrifies and illuminates' Scotsman'Brilliant and disturbing' Antony Beevor, The TimesW . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgu, 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.

On the Natural History of Destruction

Penguin Books, Ltd.

After Nature

Biographies & Memoirs

Translated by Michael Hamburger

Arts & Literature

In young austerlitz taken from the last book w g sebald saw published we are told the story of a man who learns that his past is a lie

Young Austerlitz (Pocket Penguins)

Contemporary

Place In The Country

<p>This book brings together poems from throughout WG Sebald's life, as well as additional works found after his death in 2001. The poems are arranged chronologically from his student days in the 1960s and are suffused with the themes which dominated Sebald's work - nature and history, death and memory, journeys and landscapes. Translated, with an introduction and notes by Iain Galbraith.</p>

Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001

Hamish Hamilton

For a number of years until his death in 2001, W. G. Sebald and the German artist Jan Peter Tripp exchanged poems and lithographs. Unrecounted is the result of this long artistic friendship a creative dialogue inspired by shared concerns. Sebald's words and Tripp's images speak of moments salvaged from time passing, of our eyes bearing witness, and of memory and remembrance. And to quote the critic Andrea Kohler: this poem of gazes has become a memorial, a bequeathal. If Sebald never tired of tracing the destinations of his soul-mates among writers, outsiders and emigrants in his sentences endlessly meandering through space and time, this legacy of his has the density of epitaphs.'

Unrecounted

Campo Santo

History

Hamish Hamilton Ltd.

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 and mysterious style—part critical essay, part memoir—Sebald weaves their lives and art with his own migrations and rise in the literary world.   Here are people gifted with talent and courage yet in some cases cursed by fragile and unstable natures, working in countries inhospitable or even hostile to them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is conjured on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, hiding from his detractors on the island of St. Pierre, where two centuries later Sebald took rooms adjacent to his. Eighteenth-century author Johann Peter Hebel is remembered for his exquisite and delicate nature writing, expressing the eternal balance of both the outside world and human emotions. Writer Gottfried Keller, best known for his 1850 novel Green Henry, is praised for his prescient insights into a Germany where “the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider.”   Sebald compassionately re-creates the ordeals of Eduard Mörike, the nineteenth-century German poet beset by mood swings, depression, and fainting spells in an increasingly shallow society, and Robert Walser, the institutionalized author whose nearly indecipherable scrawls seemed an attempt to “duck down below the level of language and obliterate himself” (and whose physical appearance and year of death mirrored those of Sebald’s grandfather). Finally, Sebald spies a cognizance of death’s inevitability in painter Jan Peter Tripp’s lovingly exact reproductions of life.   Featuring the same kinds of suggestive and unexplained illustrations that appear in his masterworks Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, and translated by Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling, A Place in the Country is Sebald’s unforgettable self-portrait as seen through the experiences of others, a glimpse of his own ghosts alongside those of the men who influenced him. It is an essential addition to his stunning body of work.Praise for A Place in the Country  “Measured, solemn, sardonic . . . hypnotic . . . [W. G. Sebald’s] books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review“In Sebald’s writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death. The scholarly craft of gathering scattered sources and weaving them into a coherent whole is transformed here into something beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald’s strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate  “Magnificent . . . The multiple layers surrounding each essay are seamless to the point of imperceptibility.”—New York Daily News   “Sebald’s most tender and jovial book.”—The Nation“Reading [A Place in the Country is] like going for a walk with a beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”—New York

A Place in the Country

Penguin??Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by W.G. Sebald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by W.G. Sebald