A searing portrayal of Vienna's bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife--a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day. Reflections on Joana's life and suicide are mixed with these denunciations until the famous actor arrives, bringing an explosive end to the evening that even the writer could not have seen coming.

Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel.--Robert Craft, New York Review of Books.

Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction.--George Steiner

Considered by many critics to be Thomas Bernhard's masterpiece, Correction is a cunningly crafted and unforgettable meditation on the tension between the desire for perfection and the knowledge that it is unattainable.

The playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard was one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation, winner of the three most coveted literary prizes in Germany. Gargoyles, one of his earliest novels, is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity.

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter--from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage--coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century.-Gabriel Josipovici, Independent

With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war.-Spectator

Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier.

Visceral, raw, singular, and unforgettable, Frost is the story of a friendship between a young man beginning his medical career and a painter in his final days. The youth has accepted an unusual assignment, to travel to a miserable mining town in the middle of nowhere in order to clinically--and secretly--observe and report on his mentor's reclusive brother, the painter Strauch. Carefully disguising himself as a law student with a love of Henry James, he befriends the aging artist and attempts to carry out his mission, only to find himself caught up in his subject's apparent madness.

Thomas Bernhard is widely considered to be one of the most important German playwrights in the post-war era. Highly acclaimed, he has written over twenty plays and novels and gained a reputation as one of Austria's most controversial authors.

Bernhard wrote Heldenplatz in 1988 as a response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Hitler's Germany. Highly controversial in Austria, the play concerns a Jewish professor who returns to Vienna after the Second World War and discovers that his fellow Austrians are as anti-semitic as ever.

'Heldenplatz' is the square in Vienna where the Austrian-born Hitler made his first speech after the Anschluss.

In Heldenplatz, Bernhard's final play, he explores the shared isolation of people who have lost their bearings, along with most of their illusions.

The cold increases with the clarity, said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realization that the West's last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends that bleak vision of the master Austrian storyteller.

In Ungenach, the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In The Weatherproof Cape, a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. Midland in Stilfs casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In At the Ortler, two middle-aged brothers--one a scientist, the other an acrobat--meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in At the Timberline, the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.

Save Yourself if You Can is a collection of six plays that span the entirety of Thomas Bernhard's career as a dramatist. The plays collected in this long-awaited addition to Bernhard's oeuvre in English--The Ignoramus and the Madman, The Celebrities, Immanuel Kant, The Goal Attained, Simply Complicated, and Elizabeth II--traverse somber lyricism and misanthropy to biting satire and glorious slapstick. They explore themes that will be familiar to longtime readers of Bernhardt, but here they are presented in a subtly different register, attuned to the needs of the stage.

A powerful, compact novella, Walking provides a perfect introduction to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard, showing a preoccupation with themes-illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships-that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. Walking records the conversations of the unnamed narrator and his friend Oehler while they walk, discussing anything that comes to mind but always circling back to their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone irrevocably mad. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical work in Bernhard's highly philosophical oeuvre, Walking provides a penetrating meditation on the impossibility of truly thinking.

In this stunning translation of The Voice Imitator, Bernhard gives us one of his most darkly comic works. A series of parable-like anecdotes-some drawn from newspaper reports, some from conversation, some from hearsay-this satire is both subtle and acerbic. What initially appear to be quaint little stories inevitably indict the sterility and callousness of modern life, not just in urban centers but everywhere. Bernhard presents an ordinary world careening into absurdity and disaster. Politicians, professionals, tourists, civil servants-the usual victims of Bernhard's inspired misanthropy-succumb one after another to madness, mishap, or suicide. The shortest piece, titled Mail, illustrates the anonymity and alienation that have become standard in contemporary society: For years after our mother's death, the Post Office still delivered letters that were addressed to her. The Post Office had taken no notice of her death.

In his disarming, sometimes hilarious style, Bernhard delivers a lethal punch with every anecdote. George Steiner has connected Bernhard to the great constellation of Kafka, Musil, and Broch, and John Updike has compared him to Grass, Handke, and Weiss. The Voice Imitator reminds us that Thomas Bernhard remains the most caustic satirist of our age.

The cold increases with the clarity, said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realization that the West's last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends that bleak vision of the master Austrian storyteller.

In Ungenach, the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In The Weatherproof Cape, a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. Midland in Stilfs casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In At the Ortler, two middle-aged brothers--one a scientist, the other an acrobat--meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in At the Timberline, the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.

A brilliant and haunting tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, Concrete is a perfect example of why Thomas Bernhard is remembered as one of the masters of contemporary European fiction (George Steiner).

Franz-Josef Murau--the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family--lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg. And he must decide its fate. Written in the seamless, mesmerizing style for which Bernhard was
famous, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.

An Edinburgh International Festival production.

The lobby of a grand hotel, New Year's Eve. A snow storm rages. Minetti, a long-forgotten actor, arrives in great spirits to discuss his comeback as King Lear with a theatre director.

While he waits patiently in the hotel lobby, Minetti's obsessive personality reveals itself in a series of strange encounters with other guests. He rails against outrageous fortune and unfulfilled ambitions, often colliding with crowds of young hotel guests who frequently burst in to celebrate New Year's Eve. As with King Lear, the storm which rages outside reflects his turbulent emotions until he finally finds peace and resolution.

Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and an adored grandfather in right-wing, Catholic Austria. He ran away from home at age fifteen. Three years later, he contracted pneumonia and was placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, where he observed first-hand--and with unflinching acuity--the cruel nature of protracted suffering and death. From the age of twenty-one, everything he wrote was shaped by the urgency of a dying man's testament--and where this account of his life ends, his art begins.

Included in this edition is My Prizes, a collection of Bernhard's viciously funny and revelatory essays on his later literary life. Here is a portrait of the artist as a prize-winner: laconic, sardonic, shaking his head with biting amusement at the world and at himself.