After Nature (First Edition)

W.G. Sebald (author); Michael Hamburger (translator)

ISBN 10: 0375504850 / ISBN 13: 9780375504853

Published by Random House, New York, 2002

About this Item

Random House, New York, 2002. First American edition. First printing, with full number line to 2 (as was customary of Random House at time of publication). A very fine (as-new) copy in a very fine (as-new) jacket. A clean, tight copy with price ($21.95) intact on front flap. Comes with archival-quality jacket protector. Translated from the German by Hamburger. Rear-Poetry.

Seller Inventory # FLAHIVE-3358

Bibliographic Details

• Title: After Nature (First Edition)
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375504850
• ISBN 13: 9780375504853
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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 Grünewald. The second is the Enlightenment botanist-explorer Georg Steller, who accompanied Bering to the Arctic. The third is the author himself, who describes his wanderings among landscapes scarred by the wrecked certainties of previous ages.

After Nature introduces many of the themes that W. G. Sebald explored in his subsequent books. A haunting vision of the waxing and waning tides of birth and devastation that lie behind and before us, it confirms the author’s position as one of the most profound and original writers of our time.

About the Author

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 previously translated 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. He died in December 2001.