Things That Disappear

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

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

"“The most profound, intelligent, humane, and important writer of our times.” "

"“Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating—ferocious as well as virtuosic.”"

"“Her retrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming.”"

"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"

"Meditative, moving, and profoundly beautiful."

"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."

"Things That Disappear captures with startling lucidity a modernity characterized by unrest, upset, and dissolution."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"Beguiling... What I love most about Erpenbeck's writing is how naturally such eccentric yet deeply humane provocations come."

"A kaleidoscopic of transience... this collection of columns reveals a keen eye for the details that mark the passing of time."

An epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature, Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She studied theater at the Humboldt University in Berlin and directed operas in the nineties. She is also author of such books as The Old Child & Other Stories, The Book of Words, and The End of Days. Kurt Beals has translated books by Jenny Erpenbeck, Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, and Reiner Stach.