by Carol Jacobs High-brow analysis of the enigmatic author's oeuvre. This is a very high-brow book. I will eagerly read anything that might assist me in my ongoing efforts to get my head around the unclassifiable wonderfulness of W.G. Sebald's published works. Carol Jacobs certainly knows her onions. She has spotted all manner of running… Continue reading Sebald's Vision
Reviews: Sebaldian
Book review: ‘M Train’ by Patti Smith
A fascinating exercise in ‘writing about nothing’.
Book Review: ‘Threads’ by Julia Blackburn
The Delicate Life of John Craske.
Common Ground
by Rob Cowen A strange book about a local edge-land. This book, which has received rave reviews, wasn't what I expected. I was expecting a fairly typical ‘nature writing’ account of the author's local patch of edge-land near Harrogate in Yorkshire. Perhaps I should have read the dust-jacket more carefully: Blurring the boundaries of memoir,… Continue reading Common Ground
Urne-burial
by Sir Thomas Browne Reflections on the iniquity of oblivion. I first encountered the seventeenth-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne in an essay by one of my favourite writers, Stephen Jay Gould. Many years later, I encountered him again in W.G. Sebald's mastepiece, The Rings of Saturn. Sebald refers to Browne's essay on an ancient urn-burial… Continue reading Urne-burial
Book review: ‘After Nature’ by W.G. Sebald
Three long-form poems, best read as prose.
Book review: ‘A Place in the Country’ by W.G. Sebald
Essays on five writers and a painter who influenced Sebald’s work.
Book review: ‘Across the Land and the Water’ by W.G. Sebald
Selected poems, 1964–2001.
Book review: ‘On the Natural History of Destruction’ by W.G. Sebald
An extended essay on the ‘scandalous deficiency’ of texts about the Allied bombing of Germany.
Book review: ‘The Rings of Saturn’ by W.G. Sebald
Unclassifiable masterpiece.