When W.G. Sebald travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Walser and Jan Peter Tripp. Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place — as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration — Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice. A Place in the Country is a window into the mind of this much loved and much missed writer

“A splendid addition to an already extraordinary oeuvre.”—Teju Cole, The New Yorker German-born W. G. Sebald is best known as the innovative author of Austerlitz, the prose classic of World War II culpability and conscience that put its author in the company of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges. Now comes the first major collection of this literary master’s poems. Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, they range from pieces Sebald wrote as a student in the sixties to those completed right before his untimely death in 2001. In nearly one hundred poems — the majority published in English for the first time — Sebald explores his trademark themes, from nature and history, to wandering and wondering, to oblivion and memory. Soaring and searing, the poetry of W. G. Sebald is an indelible addition to his superb body of work, and this collection is bound to become a classic in its own right. “How fortunate we are to have this writer’s startling imagination freshly on display once again, expressed in language honed to a perfect simplicity.”—Billy Collins “A watershed volume. . nothing less than transcendent.”—BookPage “[Sebald was] a defining writer of his era.”—The New Republic

After Nature, W. G. Sebald’s first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind’s place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, “an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance.” The first figure is the great German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages. After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time

This final collection of essays by W. G. Sebald offers profound ruminations on many themes common to his work — the power of memory and personal history, the connections between images in the arts and life, the presence of ghosts in places and artifacts. Some of these pieces pay tribute to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present, examining, among other things, the island’s formative effect on its most famous citizen, Napoleon. In others, Sebald examines how the works of Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll reveal “the grave and lasting deformities in the emotional lives” of postwar Germans; how Kafka echoes Sebald’s own interest in spirit presences among mortal beings; and how literature can be an attempt at restitution for the injustices of the real world. Dazzling in its erudition, accessible in its deep emotion, Campo Santo confirms Sebald’s status as one of the great modern writers who divined and expressed the invisible connections that determine our lives. “W. G. Sebald exemplified the best kind of cosmopolitan literary intelligence — humane, digressive, deeply erudite, unassuming and tinged with melancholy. . In [Campo Santo] Sebald reveals his distinctive tone, as his winding sentences gradually mingle together curiosity and plangency, learning and self-revelation. . [Readers will] be rewarded with unexpected illuminations.” — The Washington Post Book World “Brilliant … bursting with flavors … at once precise and luscious … [Campo Santo] reminds us what a significant loss [Sebald’s] early passing was to the literary world.… [The] travel essays on Corsica are absolute gems.… [D]iscussions of Nabokov, Kafka, Gunter Grass, and the schizophrenic poet Herbeck … provide a satisfaction as rare as a perfect meal.” — The Boston Globe “[A] darkly companionable voice … This magnificent writer may have left abruptly, but his own shadow lingers.” — The New York Times Book Review “Max Sebald has begun to be widely recognized as one of the most important prose writers of the past 20 years.” — The Economist “Nuanced … multidimensional … Ruminative and elegiac, the late W. G. Sebald wove threads of timelessness connecting past and present.” — The Dallas Morning News “All of Sebald’s books are about journeys … [and he] is an entertaining guide.” — The New York Review of Books “[Sebald] is prone to visions, hallucinations, and premonitions, usually induced by a confrontation with a personal memory or a historical site. These are the source of the subdued horror of much of Sebald’s work, and also of its very dry humor.… Four fragments of a literary work about a trip to Corsica … have the virtues of Sebald’s best work, with its odd blend of fiction, memoir, history, and travelogue.” — The New York Sun “Stunning … intensely observant, erudite, lyrical, and provocative … Detailed descriptions of Sebald’s wanderings on [Corsica] turn into musings of astonishing beauty and insight into history, environmental decimation, and our feelings about death. These arresting meditations, brilliant syntheses of thought and feeling, are followed by masterful, passionate critical essays expressing Sebald’s belief in the healing power of literature and our obligation to remember the past and respect life in all its wonders and mysteries — Booklist “[A] masterful translation … Sebald was a beautiful and intelligent writer.” — Publishers Weekly “If you thought literary modernism was dead, guess again. The spirit of such masters as Kafka and Borges lives on in the [work] of W. G. Sebald.” — The Wall Street Journal

"A masterpiece." — Richard Eder, The New York Times. Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US, The Emigrants has been acclaimed as "one of the best novels to appear since World War II" (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and three times chosen as the 1996 International Book of the Year. The poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, while the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at first appear to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of several Jewish exiles in England, Austria, and America. The narrator literally follows their footsteps, studding each story with photographs and creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album. But gradually, Sebald's prose, which combines documentary description with almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts a new magic, and the four stories merge into one. Illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange. . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit." — Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review "Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn — with its curious archive of photographs — chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."

The beguiling first novel by W. G. Sebald, one of the most enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo, W. G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald — the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness — takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts — Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."