Silent Catastrophes

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