21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world
Description
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).
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).
Product Details
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publish Date | March 25, 2025 |
| Pages | 544 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781400067725 |
| Dimensions | 8.6 X 5.8 X 1.7 inches | 1.4 pounds |
About the Author
W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz (named a Top 10 Book of the 21st Century by the New York Times), After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted, Campo Santo, and Silent Catastrophes among other publications.
Reviews
Praise for Silent Catastrophes
“The only question I have is why it took so long for this book—which compiles two books of essays by W.G. Sebald, The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991—to reach us poor English speakers. The essays in question are deep-dives on some of the writers whose work meant the most to Sebald, including Bernhard, Kafka, and Roth, and no doubt will shed a fascinating light on the genre-bending novelist’s own works.”—Literary Hub
Praise for W. G. Sebald
“Sebald is a rare and elusive species . . . but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. . . . He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.”—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“One of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary European writers.”—James Wood, The New Republic
“Sebald is that rare being: an inimitable stylist who creates extraordinary sentences that, like crystals, simultaneously refract and magnify meaning.”—Booklist
“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.”—Mark O’Connell, Slate
“The only question I have is why it took so long for this book—which compiles two books of essays by W.G. Sebald, The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991—to reach us poor English speakers. The essays in question are deep-dives on some of the writers whose work meant the most to Sebald, including Bernhard, Kafka, and Roth, and no doubt will shed a fascinating light on the genre-bending novelist’s own works.”—Literary Hub
Praise for W. G. Sebald
“Sebald is a rare and elusive species . . . but still, he is an easy read, just as Kafka is. . . . He is an addiction, and once buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to tear yourself away.”—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“One of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary European writers.”—James Wood, The New Republic
“Sebald is that rare being: an inimitable stylist who creates extraordinary sentences that, like crystals, simultaneously refract and magnify meaning.”—Booklist
“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.”—Mark O’Connell, Slate
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
