'When the schoolgirl / in the Domino Tea Room / suddenly started sobbing, / an old woman, / none of whose business it was, / said not to take things so much to heart.'
'wayward, thin-walled, aloof: / I began to appear, bitterly / striving for the impossible body / a huge hole in the hollow of the bus stop, an interior / stadium'
'Revising those essays in translation I was on my own, and I kept weighing up every sentence, wondering what Max would have thought of this or that phrasing.'
Sebald deploys photographs to continually subvert his readers’ expectations. Carefully selected and laid out, he seeks, often playfully, to insert the exotic into the everyday.
'When I met Professor Sebald for our first tutorial, I was immediately struck by how different he was from the mostly aloof, self-important professors that I was used to at Munich University.'
'Almost no one knows / that Ulrich Gwerder, / who, dressed as a merry shepherd, / posed in 1970 for a jazzy poster / for Tourist Information / in the city of Lucerne / was – at heart – a leftie.'
Are you looking for German literature? Judith Schalansky, Jan Brandt, Peter Stamm, Demetri Martin, Paul Maliszewski, Tilman Rammstedt, Marjana Gaponenko and Anthea Bell.