Edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
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 Sebald's own voice in interviews between 1997 up to a month before his death in 2001. Also included are cogent accounts of almost all of Sebald's books, thematically linked to events in the contributors' own lives.
Contributors included Carole Angier, Joseph Cuomo, Ruth Franklin, Michael Hofmann, Arthur Lubow, Tim Parks, Michael Silverblatt, Charles Simic, and Eleanor Wachtel.
A portrait in conversations and critical writing of one of the towering literary figures of our times.
W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany. For thirty years, he taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His novels—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 Literatur Nord Prize. He was also the author of three books of poems and the book-length essay, On the Natural History of Destruction.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of eight novels, three short story collections, three essay collections, three books of poetry, and three translations from Italian. Among them are the novels Rough Strife (nominated for a National Book Award) and Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction), and the memoirs Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA in fiction and translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and has taught in many other places both in the US and abroad. Schwartz lives in New York City.
