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

“The novelist and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz has carefully rendered these subtle currents of belief and sensibility, moving always beneath an airy conversational style, in dexterous prose.”—Virginia Quarterly Review on A Place to Live and other selected essays by Natalia Ginzburg

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 pieces culled from essays, interviews, and reviews, award-winning translator and author Lynn Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the late Sebald, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation in post-Nazi Europe. 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 include Carole Angier, Joseph Cuomo, Ruth Franklin, Michael Hofmann, Arthur Lubow, Tim Parks, Michael Silverblatt, Charles Simic, and Eleanor Wachtel.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of nineteen works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and memoir. She has been nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and she won the PEN Renato Poggioli Award for Translation in 1991.