Absolutely Serious

Experimental and philosophical, worldly and yet also melancholy and inwardly-turned, the works of W.G. Sebald looms large. But since his death in 2001, his reputation has become formidable, even imposing. At times, David Schurman Wallace writes, he feels like a totem: the Western world’s last Absolutely Serious Writer. Indeed, nearly everyone praises his labyrinthine and often dense books—to the point that the way people talk about him can almost seem rote: a received idea. The recently translated Silent Catastrophes, a collection of the German writer’s early works and essays, allows us to see him in a different light. Reviewing the collection for Books & the Arts, Wallace finds that the early “essays are a personal genealogy of some of Sebald’s important German-language predecessors, and at the same time a window into an author in the process of self-making.” What we can gain from reading the early work, then, is a view of the author before he became a stereotype. Read “Before Sebald Was Great”

The Dump

Garbage, by its nature, is a problem continually deferred. Where it goes is, at best, an afterthought, and likely not a pleasant one. We may dutifully sort and recycle our trash, but we are otherwise powerless to control the destiny of the detritus we create with our modern lives. Even worse: Garbage has become a symbol of global inequality, as rich countries import their particularly toxic waste to less fortunate places in the world. In Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, journalist Alexander Clapp takes us on an international tour of trash and its global importation—from toxic e-waste in Ghana to illegal dumps in Turkey, deadly shipbreakers in the Aegean Sea, and plastic-sludge riverbanks in Guatemala, among other locales. In her review of the book, Carol Schaeffer,argues that Waste Wars “reveals the price that is paid by others for the conveniences in our own lives, which may otherwise remain unknown to us.” And ultimately: “Waste isn’t just what we discard—it’s what our system is built to ignore” Read “Want to Understand Global Inequality? Visit the Dump”