Synopses & Reviews
When German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven, the literary world mourned the loss of a writer whose oeuvre it was just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, award-winning translator and author Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the writer, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation.
With contributions from poet, essayist, and translator Charles Simic, New Republic editor Ruth Franklin, Bookworm radio host Michael Silverblatt, and more, The Emergence of Memory offers Sebalds own voice in interviews between 1997 up to a month before his death in 2001. Also included are cogent accounts of almost all of Sebalds books, thematically linked to events in the contributors own lives.
Contributors include Carole Angier, Joseph Cuomo, Ruth Franklin, Michael Hofmann, Arthur Lubow, Tim Parks, Michael Silverblatt, Charles Simic, and Eleanor Wachtel.
Synopsis
The eloquence of W.G. Sebald is revived.
About the Author
Lynne Sharon Schwartz: Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of fourteen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as the widely acclaimed memoir, Ruined by Reading. Her novel Leaving Brooklyn (1989) was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. Schwartz is a native and current New Yorker. Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. Since 1967 he has published twenty books of his poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous poetry translations. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship. He is the poetry editor of The Paris Review. Ruth Franklin has been an editor at The New Republic since 1999. Her criticism also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, Slate, and other publications. She is currently at work on a book about literature and the Holocaust.