Damion Searls is a writer and a translator of many classic twentieth-century authors, including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard. His translation of Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He also edited Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861, available as an NYRB Classic.
Books
Amsterdam Stories
The first English-language translation of a writer whose growing reputation and cult readership have marked him as a figure in world literature. Nescio’s stories are inhabited by wastrels and charmers, the young and the no-longer-young, the bourgeois and the bohemian. He is a great stylist, capturing the mercantile city of Amsterdam and its bucolic surrounding countryside with equal vitality.
Tun-huang
A magical and vivid adventure story set among the bandits, scholars, and monks of the fabled Silk Road. All seems lost when Chao Hsing-te sleeps through the exams that are to launch his career. But then a beautiful woman hands him a scrap of paper, written in a mysterious language, and he follows her into the desert…
The Journal 1837-1861
To understand Thoreau, one must read his journals—but until now they have never been available in a one-volume reader’s edition that draws on the entirety of his 14-volume journal. Here at last is the essence of the great naturalist’s thoughts, accumulated over the span of a life time