Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

The British publisher Legenda has just announced a new book on Sebald being edited by Jo Catling (of the University of East Anglia) and Richard Hibbitt (of the University of Leeds): Saturn’s Moons: A W G Sebald Handbook. (Catling was a teaching colleague of Sebald’s and her elegy, Silent Catastrophe: In Memoriam W. G. (Max) Sebald 1944 - 2001, can be found here at New Books in German, along with many other very interesting articles on German-language literature.)

On the Legenda website, there are links to distributors where the volume can be pre-ordered in Great Britain or in the US. Or you can find it already listed on Amazon.uk. Here is the description of the book (cut and pasted from the publisher), which is set to appear in December 2008.

The German novelist, poet and critic W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) has in recent years attracted a phenomenal international following for his evocative prose works, such as “Die Ausgewanderten” (”The Emigrants”), “Die Ringe des Saturn” (”The Rings of Saturn”) and “Austerlitz”, spellbinding elegiac narratives which, through their deliberate blurring of genre boundaries and provocative use of photography, explore questions of Heimat and exile, memory and loss, history and natural history, art and nature. “Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook” brings together in one volume a wealth of new critical and visual material on Sebald’s life and works, encompassing a range of first-hand accounts by his former colleagues and students.The contributions cover various phases and facets of the writer’s career, including Sebald as teacher, as founder of the British Centre for Literary Translation at UEA, and as scholar and critic. Lavishly illustrated, the Handbook contains definitive primary and secondary bibliographies, details of audiovisual material and interviews, and a catalogue of Sebald’s library.

The contributors include Jo Catling, Florian Radvan, Clive Scott, Richard Sheppard, Gordon Turner and Ulrich von Bulow. Drawing on a range of original sources from the Sebald Nachlass - the most important part of which is now held in Marbach, where it will be the subject of a major exhibition in 2008-9 - “Saturn’s Moons” provides an invaluable source for future Sebald studies in English and German alike, complementing recent critical works on subjects such as history, memory, modernity, reader response and the visual.