Silent Catastrophes
  • Published: 23 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241144190
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $55.00

Silent Catastrophes

Essays in Austrian Literature

Formats & editions
Hardback
23 Apr 2025
EBook
23 Jan 2025
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From acclaimed critic, novelist and academic W. G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, a collection of essay on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighbouring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by 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.
  • Published: 23 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241144190
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $55.00
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About the author

W.G. Sebald

W G Sebald (Author)
W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, in the Bavarian Alps, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, settling permanently in England in 1970. He was professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of The Emigrants which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz. W. G. Sebald died in 2001.

Michael Hulse and Simon Rae (Translators)
Michael Hulse teaches poetry at Warwick University and regularly does reading tours in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. He is based in Warwick. Simon Rae is a playwright , novelist and broadcaster (he presented Radio 4's 'Poetry Please' for several years). He lives in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Both Michael Hulse and Simon Rae are published poets and winners of the National Poetry Competition.

portrait photo of W.G. Sebald

Also by W.G. Sebald

The Emergence of Memory
The Rings of Saturn
The Emigrants
Vertigo
See all

Praise for Silent Catastrophes

Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream . . . An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature

New Yorker

Sebald is surely a major European author . . . he reaches the heights of epiphanic beauty only encountered normally in the likes of Proust

Independent

Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century

The Times

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald

New York Times

W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time

Peter Carey

A profoundly affirming book about the potential for literature . . . Since his death in 2001 it has become increasingly clear that WG Sebald is not just a very good writer, but quite simply one of the few essential writers of this generation . . . Nobody captures the epitaph quality of pastoral as well as he did

The Scotsman

Fascinating . . . A group portrait of a country and an empire in crisis . . . The reader will soon find not only Sebald’s trademark concerns emerging but unexpected reflections on how we might navigate the end of empire and the rise of authoritarianism . . . For someone who may be feeling, in 2025, that their own homeland has become hostile and uncanny, there’s much here to help make sense of that feeling of eeriness, and a repeated attempt to chart some kind of path forward

New Republic

This book is full of strange and tender moments when Sebald’s feeling for his subject translates into scenes and images that might have come straight from Austerlitz or The Rings of Saturn . . . Sebald push[es] past literary history, criticism or biography to another, visionary realm

Art Review

A writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity

Guardian

Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream... An extraordinary presence in contemporary literature

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