Awards

• Short-listed for National Book Awards (Translation) 2021

Overview

Each disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific—shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss.       With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.

Full Product Details

9780811229630

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Reviews

Utterly fascinating. -- Rosmarie Waldrop Exquisite. Like the hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel A Rebours, who sets off for London from Paris but realizes he need go no further than the Gare du Nord, Schalansky decides to make a virtue of absence. -- Robert Macfarlane A celebration of what can still be accomplished with imagination, paper. and ink. -- Anthony Doerr The most wondrous book of the year: by taking the vanished and turning it into a great piece of literature, the author has performed a magical act. -- Die Zeit

Utterly fascinating. -- Rosmarie Waldrop Exquisite. Like the hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel A Rebours, who sets off for London from Paris but realizes he need go no further than the Gare du Nord, Schalansky decides to make a virtue of absence. -- Robert Macfarlane A celebration of what can still be accomplished with imagination, paper. and ink. -- Anthony Doerr The most wondrous book of the year: by taking the vanished and turning it into a great piece of literature, the author has performed a magical act. -- Die Zeit An exploration of extinct animals and objects told through dazzling stories that question the bounds of memory and myth. -- Kirkus *STARRED REVIEW* Schalansky cements her reputation as a peerless chronicler of the fabulous, the faraway, and the forgotten. -- Publishers Weekly (starred) Twelve fictional essays comprise this stunning work depicting animals, places, objects, and buildings that are lost forever... Not to be read quickly but savored and contemplated. -- Library Journal (starred)

Utterly fascinating. -- Rosmarie Waldrop Exquisite. Like the hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel A Rebours, who sets off for London from Paris but realizes he need go no further than the Gare du Nord, Schalansky decides to make a virtue of absence. -- Robert Macfarlane A celebration of what can still be accomplished with imagination, paper. and ink. -- Anthony Doerr The most wondrous book of the year: by taking the vanished and turning it into a great piece of literature, the author has performed a magical act. -- Die Zeit An exploration of extinct animals and objects told through dazzling stories that question the bounds of memory and myth. -- Kirkus *STARRED REVIEW*

Author Information

Judith Schalansky, born in Greifswald in 1980, lives in Berlin and works as a writer, book designer, and editor (of the prestigious natural history list at Matthes und Seitz). Her books, including the international bestseller Atlas of Remote Islands and the novel The Giraffe’s Neck, have been translated into more than twenty languages. Jackie Smith is a literary translator working from German and French into English. After graduating from Cambridge University she worked as a commercial translator before dedicating herself full-time to creative and book translations. In 2015 she was selected to participate in the New Books in German ‘Emerging Translators Programme’. Her translation of an excerpt from Hans Platzgumer’s novel Am Rand (On the Edge) won the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize 2017.

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