This month, the LitHAUS reading group will be reading
An Inventory of Losses (2018) by Judith Schalansky and the book discussion will take place on May 26th @ 6:30 PM. Please register for the event beforehand and join the discussion
We give away five copies of the month's book selection about five weeks before each LitHAUS discussion. These will be distributed on a first-come-first-serve basis and availability will be announced on our social media channels.
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Feel free to read the novel in English or German; the discussion will be in English.
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About the book
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith
224 pages.
ISBN 9780811229630
Named a best book of 2021 by The Wall Street Journal: “Disappearance may be a forlorn theme, but it has rarely been granted such reverent contemplation, or been made to feel so powerfully tangible.”
© New Directions
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.
Summary by New Directions
© René Fietzek
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 was selected for the New Books in German Emerging Translators Program and in 2017 won the Austrian Cultural Forum London Translation Prize.
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