Books by W.G Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G Sebald
This one’s a novel - a rambling narrative of geography, literature and objects and it’s punctuated, as are all of Sebald’s books, by these odd little photographs, which often don’t appear to bear any relationship to what’s in the text at all. I think Sebald was actually sued a couple of times for copyright infringement, because he just photographs things out of books and then sticks them in his novels. He breaks all the rules. He just sticks a picture in the middle of the page. At times they illustrate what he’s talking about, but just as often they don’t. As a novelist, I think he’s spawned a whole industry which theorises the relationship of pictures to words.
Interviews where books by W.G Sebald were recommended
The Best Hiking Memoirs, recommended by Gail Simmons
Accounts of journeys on foot capture the imagination; partly this is a function of the satisfaction of following a linear journey from start to finish, and partly it is a quality inherent to walking itself—a freeing of the mind. Gail Simmons, who follows an old English pilgrimage route in her book Between the Chalk and the Sea, selects five hiking memoirs that celebrate the liberation that comes from putting one foot after another.
Bruce Chatwin: Books that Influenced Him, recommended by Nicholas Shakespeare
With his books In Patagonia and The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) reinvented travel literature. Nicholas Shakespeare, his biographer, lifts the lid on a complex life and selects five books that influenced Chatwin’s work.
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen on Extraordinary Art Books
The arts books publisher chooses a book about Rembrandt’s representation of his own nose, and tells the bigger story is about the way in which Rembrandt renders sense of flesh in his prints and his oil paintings
