After Nature (Paperback)

After Nature

“In the five or six years before he was killed in December 2001, Max Sebald began to reap the harvest of a lifetime’s immaculate thinking, feeling, and writing. He became widely celebrated for the originality of his forms, for his range, and for his emotional seriousness. All these things are present here, in the first of his posthumously published works. In language that is at once plainly strong and spiderishly delicate, he addresses the themes of migration, stillness, and remembering which were his recurrent preoccupation. But by presenting them within the mixed disciplines and freedoms of blank verse, he gives them terrific freshness and potency. After Nature is a deeply intelligent book, but also a marvelously warm, exciting, and compassionate one.” —Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate of England

“W. G. 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