W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His books 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. His other books include After Nature, Campo Santo, and On the Natural History of Destruction. He died in December 2001.
“[A] beautiful novel . . . quietly breathtaking . . . Sebald
contrives not to offer an ordinary, straightforward recital. For
what is so delicate is how Sebald makes Austerlitz’s story a
broken, recessed enigma whose meaning the reader must impossibly
rescue.”—James Wood, from the Introduction
“Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the
Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum
that after it, there can be no art.”—Richard Eder, The New York
Times Book Review
“Sebald is a rare and elusive species . . . but still, he is an
easy read, just as Kafka is. . . . He is an addiction, and once
buttonholed by his books, you have neither the wish nor the will to
tear yourself away.”—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“Sebald’s final novel; his masterpiece, and one of the supreme
works of art of our time.”—John Banville, The Guardian
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