Description
An exciting new collection of autobiographical essays by Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of the 2024 Booker International Prize: “She is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have—it’s no surprise that she is already bruited as a future Nobelist.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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
"The traces of East Germany continue to vibrate in the unsettled politics of today's Germany, and Erpenbeck applies her finely calibrated divining rod to chart that story down the decades." — Anne McElvoy, The Financial Times
"Exquisite... Erpenbeck masterfully conveys the sense of before and after that comes with living in the aftermath, moving deftly between the everyday and the ways in which history impacts it." — Necia Chronister, World Literature Today
"Erpenbeck's words are a kind of bulwark, a catalog of the minor details and inconsequential impressions that make up the course of a private life. They are her fragments, shored up against forgetting. And in reading, they become ours too." — Robert Rubsam, The Baffler
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