The Emergence of Memory ─ Conversations With W. G. Sebald

“Schwartz does a fine job of evoking this elusive author.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“If this interesting book of criticism and interviews introduces you to Sebald or encourages you to return to him, it will have served a noble purpose.“—The Jerusalem Post

“The great achievement of [Sebald’s] work is that he makes it audible to his readers while still honoring the silence.”—Evelyn Toynton, Harper’s Magazine

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 we were just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, American novelist and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the late author, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of modern history, dislocation, and the role of memory. Includes essays from Charles Simic, Ruth Franklin, Michael Silverblatt, and others.

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944. 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 is also the author of three books of poems and a book-length essay. He died in December 2001.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz has authored fourteen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as the widely acclaimed memoir Ruined by Reading. She won the PEN Renato Pogglioli Award for her translation from Italian of Liana Millu’s Smoke Over Birkenau.