Things That Disappear

Reviews

"“The impact is of a master at work—Erpenbeck ought to be considered for the Nobel.” " — John Domini, The Washington Post

"“The most profound, intelligent, humane, and important writer of our times.” " — Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

"“Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating—ferocious as well as virtuosic.”" — Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books

"“Her retrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming.”" — Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love

"An ethereal collection of memories, delicately rendered before their inevitable crumbling away.... A wistful record of memory and loss. Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic" — Kirkus

"Meditative, moving, and profoundly beautiful." — Edmund de Waal

"In these tender, poignant pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the silence left in the wake of an absence or disappearance. She captures the ineffable quality of memory with a quiet, haunting intensity, where a sentence or a paragraph can turn on a word and devastate." — Mary Costello

"Things That Disappear captures with startling lucidity a modernity characterized by unrest, upset, and dissolution." — Philip Harris, The Cleveland Review of Books

"With its philosophical observations about everyday life compressed into brief anecdotes, the feuilleton is a venerable literary form, practiced in Germany by the likes of Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer. Now available in English in Kurt Beals's translation, Things That Disappear shows Erpenbeck to be a worthy inheritor of this tradition." — The New York Times