Austerlitz (Advance Reader's Edition)

W. G. Sebald

ISBN 10: 0375504834 / ISBN 13: 9780375504839

Published by Random House, New York, 2001

About this Item

New York: Random House, 2001. Advance Reader's Edition. Trade paperback format, glossy illustrated wrappers, same cover art as finished version of book. Very Fine. Comes with Random House publicity letter. A tight clean copy of this advance version of the novel. Octavo, 298 pages. "Austerlitz" follows a man's lifelong investigation into his own past as a Jewish child refugee in wartime Europe, tracing hidden histories through architecture, memory, and loss. Sebald (1944-2001), a German-born writer and academic, published for novels: "The Emigrants," "The Rings of Saturn," "Vertigo, and "Austerlitz," his final novel, shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize. Sebald died shortly after publication of this book.

Seller Inventory # PROOFS-Sebald

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Austerlitz (Advance Reader's Edition)
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375504834
• ISBN 13: 9780375504839
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: Special Edition
• Condition: As New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • German Literature

About this title

Synopsis

Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W.G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is. An orphan who came to England alone in the summer of 1939 and was raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife as their own, Austerlitz grew up with no conscious memory of where he came from.

W.G. Sebald embodies in Austerlitz the universal human search for identity, the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a struggle complicated by the mind’s defenses against trauma. Along the way, this novel of many riches dwells magically on a variety of subjects–railway architecture, military fortifications; insets, plants, and animals; the constellations; works of art; the strange contents of the museum of a veterinary school; a small circus; and the three capital cities that loom over the book, London, Paris, and Prague–in the service of its astounding vision.

About the Author

W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He has taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, since 1970, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 194 was the first director of the British Center for Literary Translation. His three previous books have won a number of international awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize.