“Walter Abish should be on every bookshelf in these times,” she sighs to her dog Radu.

Making the wrong choice is the way characters are tested in Shirley Hazzard’s universe. In her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus, she puts unbearable pressure on marriages & affairs to see if anyone has an ethical spine. Absolutely great reading. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/09/15/t...

Giorgio Agamben’s “Self-Portrait in the Studio” is utterly fascinating in so many ways. He uses his study as the locus for an intellectual memoir tracing the people, books & places that have been important to his thinking. Great photographs throughout.

Mathias Énard's "Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants" is not his best, but very readable. However, vol. 2 of Yoko Tawada's trilogy, "Suggested in the Stars" is mostly forgettable. It feels like she's lost her way. As they say on the news, details at: sebald.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/r...

I wrote on 2 novels I mostly liked: Mathias Énard's The Deserters & Yoko Tawada's Scattered All Over the Earth. Enard's book is about the brutal & the elite; Tawada's subtle, almost cartoony novel is about language & climate change. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/r...

There's a new edition of Andre Breton's Nadja out now by NYRB. I'm not up to comparing the new translation by Mark Polizzotti with Richard Howard's, but there are some good reasons to spring for the new edition, even though my heart loves the old Grove edition. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/07/02/t...

I'm really impressed with Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials. I gave it a good shakedown & decided it's an impressive research tool that's equally fun to browse though. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/06/13/s...

Such a great author photo. Peter Handke playing Foosball on the rear jacket of Short Letter, Long Farewell (FSG, 1974). US first edition.

I dove into John Trefry's nearly abstract novel Plats and resurfaced with a few things to say. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/t... Plats summons the reader to conjure up images and situations that can only be constructed in the mind, to use the infinite plasticity of our own imaginative processes.

Sylee Gore's first book "Maximum Summer" (Nion Editions) gives us short, intimate, sometimes visceral poems about the first few months of the poet with her new child. The poems are arranged on the page like snapshots in an album. No photographs necessary.

Second half of my long review of W.G. Sebald's book of essays on Austrian literature Silent Catastrophes, translated by the terrific Jo Catling, is up now. Get the book! It's affordable! sebald.wordpress.com/2025/04/04/s...

From Virginia Woolf's Diaries, September 10, 1918

So far, I have found 15 titles of fiction & poetry published in 2024 that use photographs. Some really great examples. Poetry books were half the titles. What did I miss? sebald.wordpress.com/2025/01/13/p...

The 18 notable books I read in 2024, from Asiya Wadud's incandescent poetry which wants to become dance, to Jeremy Eicher's Time's Echo, on music composed to commemorate the Holocaust. Also: @saintsoftness.bsky.social, Yoko Ogawa & Cristina Rivera Garza. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/01/02/n...

I'm doing a 6-parter on David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, one of the most malevolent places I have experienced in the world of literature. Peace has taken us inside the fat belly of a very uncomfortable whale, a place where there is no exit but death. Part 4 is just up.

After watching the movie version of Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These," I really need to read the book. Powerful film, great acting, little is said (but much is whispered). Cillian Murphy spends half the film looking deeply inward.