During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died--a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks, why does the subject occupy so little space in Germany's cultural memory? On the Natural History of Destruction probes deeply into this ominous silence.

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 Re-naissance painter Matthias Grunewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his...

"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
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...

What initially appears to be a plain account of the lives of Jewish emigrants in Norfolk, Austria, America and Manchester, merges into an overwhelming evocation of the experience of exile and the loss of homeland.

The Rings of Saturn with its curious archive of photographs records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald sThe Emigrants(New Directions, 1996) was...

Perfectly titled, Vertigo W.G. Sebald's marvelous first novel is a work that teeters on the edge: compelling, puzzling, and deeply unsettling.

An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys accross Europe to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, the narrator draws the reader, line by line, into a dizzying web of history, biography, legends, literature, and most perilously memories.

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