From the publisher:
Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize
Translated by Jackie Smith
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, and Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and that, taken as a whole, open mesmerizing new vistas of how to 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.
"The most wondrous book of the year: by taking what has vanished and turning it into a great piece of literature, the author has performed a magical act."
—Die Zeit
253 pages. 5" x 8.2". Softcover.
