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...

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...

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 ...

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...

In February 1981, Spain was still emerging from Franco's shadow, holding a democratic vote for the new prime minister. On the day of the vote in Parliament, while the session was being filmed by TV cameras, a band of right-wing soldiers burst in with automatic weapons, ordering everyone to get down. Only three men defied the order. For thirty-five minutes, as the cameras rolled, they stayed in their seats.Critically adored novelist Javier Cercas originally set out to write a novel ...

In Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis", Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Struggling to adapt to his new form, Gregor becomes isolated from his family, who are repulsed by his appearance. As Gregor's condition worsens, tensions rise within the household, ultimately leading to his tragic demise and forcing the family to confront their own lives and independence.

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...

In Solar Dance, acclaimed writer and scholar Modris Eksteins uses Vincent van Gogh as his lens for this brilliant survey of Western culture and politics in the last century.The long-awaited follow-up to Modris Eksteins' internationally acclaimed Rites of Springand Walking Since Daybreak. Now he has produced another thrilling, iconoclastic work of cultural history that is a trailblazing biography of an era--from the eve of the First...

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 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...

Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of fundamental shifts in German cultural memory. Focusing on the resurgence of family stories in fiction, autobiography and in film, this study challenges the institutional boundaries of Germany's memory culture that have guided and arguably limited German identity debates. Essays on contemporary German literature are complemented by explorations of heritage films and muse...

The wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century are brought to life in this beautifully told history.**"Hugely enjoyable and illuminating ... A work of narrative history at its best.” —**GuardianEurope, 1900-1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpower...