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
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

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
Categories:

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

Praise for Silent Catastrophes

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

New Yorker on
penguin pop image
penguin pop image