W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in
1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg,
Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East
Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of
European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first
director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books
The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz have
won a number of international awards, including the National Book
Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin
Literature Prize, and the LiteraTour Nord Prize. He died in
December 2001.
Translator Jo Catling joined the University of East Anglia
as Lecturer in German Literature and Language in 1993, teaching
German and European literature alongside W. G. Sebald. She has
published widely on both Sebald and Rainer Maria Rilke.
“Measured, solemn, sardonic . . . hypnotic . . . [W. G. Sebald’s]
books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for
now.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review
“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.”—Slate
“Magnificent . . . The multiple layers surrounding each essay are
seamless to the point of imperceptibility.”—New York Daily News
“Sebald’s most tender and jovial book.”—The Nation
“Reading [A Place in the Country is] like going for a walk with a
beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”—New
York
“The publication in English of A Place in the Country brings us
closer to Sebald’s oft elusive inner-evolution. . . . It is a
pleasure to read again in 2014, so lucid and temperate a voice as
the late author’s on ideas and elements of humanity so familiar—and
thus so difficult to describe freshly—as dislocation, literary
memory, and the unpaid dividends thereof.”—The Brooklyn Rail
“A Place in the Country’s publication in English is something to
celebrate.”—W. S. Merwin
“Out of exquisitely attuned feeling for the past, Sebald fashioned
an entirely new form of literature. I’ve read his books countless
times trying to understand how he did it. In the end, I can only
say that he practiced a kind of magic born out of almost
supernatural sensitivity. A Place in the Country extends the
too-short time we were given in his company.”—Nicole Krauss
“Few writers have traveled as quickly from obscurity to the sort of
renown that yields an adjective as quickly as German writer W. G.
Sebald (1944–2001), and now Sebaldian is as evocative as
Kafkaesque. Sebald is that rare being: an inimitable stylist who
creates extraordinary sentences that, like crystals, simultaneously
refract and magnify meaning. This posthumous collection, a boon to
Sebald admirers, is a series of tributes to writers and artists
Sebald admires and feels affinity with. . . . All of Sebald’s
subjects had uneasy relations with their times and with themselves:
‘Exile, as [Gottfried] Keller describes it, is a form of purgatory
located just outside the world.’ One does not have to leave home to
feel bereft, and Sebald is the great contemporary master of this
liminal territory.”—Booklist
“A beautiful book.”—The Spectator
“An intimate anatomy of the pathos, absurdity and perverse
splendour of trying to find patterns in the chaos of the
world.”—The Telegraph
“A fascinating volume that confirms Sebald as one of Europe’s most
mysterious and best-loved literary imaginations.”—Evening
Standard
“This illuminating collection shows a writer at his most
inquisitive, gazing deeply under the surface of things and
grappling with the difficulties of personal and collective
memory.”—Financial Times
“[A Place in the Country is] illuminating for its insight into the
author’s work and its obsessions, themes, and observations on home
and exile. . . . Contemplating the work of others, Sebald writes
from a writer’s rather than a reader’s perspective, of one who
shares the affliction. . . . This last word from the novelist
provides a nice footnote on his own writing.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Sebald’s subtle dissection . . . illuminates the writer’s trade .
. . by one of its more elusive practitioners. . . . These essays
are well worth reading.”—Library Journal
“Catling’s translation will be welcomed by his fans. Catling taught
with Sebald in the last decade of his life, and her flowing
translation pays crucial attention to the prosody and contours of
Sebald’s sentences.”—Publishers Weekly
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