ARGONAUT BOOKS

Weaving fiction, autobiography, and history, this collection of texts offers meditations on the diverse phenomena of decomposition and destruction. Following the conventions of a different genre, each of the pieces in Schalansky's 'Inventory' considers something that is irretrievably lost to the world, from the paradisal island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger or the Villa Sacchetti in Rome, to Sappho's love poems, Greta Garbo's fading beauty or a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. As a child of the former East Germany, it's not surprising that 'loss' and its aftermath should haunt Schalansky's ...Read More