Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning fam
Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, a dark and grotesquely funny story of small woes writ large and profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of
This controversial portrayal of Viennese artistic circles begins as the writer-narrator arrives at an 'artistic dinner' given by a composer and his society wife—a couple that the writer once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, an actor f
It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic b
Freud was fascinated by the mysteries of creativity and the imagination. The groundbreaking works that comprise The Uncanny present some of his most influential explorations of the mind. In these pieces Freud investigates the vivid but seemingly trivial c
First published in 1953, And Never Said a Word is one of Heinrich Böll's finest works, a novel that explores the extremities of marriage with depth and compassion. Böll evokes an entire emotional world in the space of a day and a half as husband and wif
Das einzige Drama des früh verstorbenen Dichters ist ein verzweifelter Protestschrei gegen die zerstörerische und verderbnisträchtige Macht des Krieges. Seine Erzählungen und Prosastücke berichten mit sicher akzentuierter Ausdruckskraft von den verhe
End of a Mission, written in 1968, finds Heinrich Boll trying to come to terms with his country's monstrous past in an investigation of an inexplicable crime and an even more absurd trial. Told to rack up mileage on a jeep to prepare it for inspection, a
From Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll, an inventive & sardonic portrayal of the effects of the Nazi period on a group of ordinary people. Weaving together the stories of a diverse array of characters, Boll explores the often bizarre & always very