Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Silent Catastrophes: Essays

Silent Catastrophes: Essays

Sebald, W. G.
Catling, Jo

Hardcover

Letters & EssaysLiterary Criticism

Publisher Price: $30.00

ISBN10: 1400067723
ISBN13: 9781400067725
Publisher: Random House
Published: Mar 25 2025
Pages: 544
Weight: 1.35
Height: 1.81 Width: 5.67 Depth: 8.19
Language: English
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 1991.

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Nazi Germany, meant that concepts such as home/land, borderland and exile occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald's own.

Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald's English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity (The Guardian).

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