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 ...

First published in 1915, Franz Kafka’s surrealist novella "The Metamorphosis" is widely acclaimed and one of the author’s best-known works. Kafka, a Jewish novelist and short-story writer, is regarded for his exploration of the fantastic. Kafka employs realism to depict his protagonists in bizarre circumstances. In "The Metamorphosis", Kafka incorporates themes of alienation and absurdity to convey narratives about isolated and anxious protagonists.Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesma...

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig (translated from the German by Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger, introduction by Harry Zohn, a chronology of Stefan Zweig's life, bibliography of works by and about Stefan Zweig in English by Randolph Klawiter; 156,000 words and 34 illustrations)This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.The World...

**INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: This “absolute gem of a book” offers a month-by-month account of the year before World War I—one of the most exciting times in the 20th century (The Observer).“A sexy, comic and occasionally heartbreaking soap opera” for history buffs interested in 20th-century art, music, and literature (Washington Post).**It was the year Henry Ford first put a conveyer belt in his car factory, and the year Louis Armstrong first picked up a tru...

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...

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...