Three Book Sebald Set

New Directions is delighted to announce beautiful new editions of these three classic Sebald novels, including his two greatest works, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. All three novels are distinguished by their translations, every line of which Sebald himself made pitch-perfect, slaving to carry into English all his essential elements: the shadows, the lambent fallings-back, nineteenth-century Germanic undertones, tragic elegiac notes, and his unique, quiet wit.

“"Think of Sebald as memory's Einstein."”

-- Richard Eder - Los Angeles Times "Sebald is a thrilling, original writer. He makes narration a state of investigative bliss." -- W. S. Di Piero - The New York Times Book Review "One of contemporary literature's most transformative figures: utterly unique. His books combine memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography in the crucible of his haunting prose style to create a strange new literary compound. Susan Sontag, in a 2000 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, asked whether 'literary greatness [was] still possible'. She concluded that 'one of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.' The books are fascinating for the way they inhabit their own self-determined genre, but that's not ultimately why they are essential reading. There is a moral magnitude and a weary, melancholy wisdom in Sebald's writing that transcends the literary and attains something like an oracular register. Reading him feels like being spoken to in a dream." -- The New Yorker

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo. Michael Hulse is an English translator, critic, and poet. Hulse has translated more than sixty books from the German.

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