The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as one of the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision - often compared to Kafka and Musil - commenting on a corrupted world. First p[...]
Roithamer has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of pure thought. We witness the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion of the negation of his own soul.[...]
"Old Masters (1985)" is Thomas Bernhard's devilishly funny story about the friendship between two old men. For over thirty years Reger, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, thinking and railing against contemporary society, his fellow men,[...]
In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been
summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While
Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher--who fears Reger's
plans to kill himself--gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his
wisdom, his de[...]
Although he is best known in the United States as a novelist, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard has been hailed in Europe as one of the most significant and controversial of contemporary playwrights. George Steiner has predicted that the current era in German-language literature will be recognized as [...]
Three novellas by the European novelist--Amras, Playing Watten, and Walking--explore the psychological crisis precipitated by modern life, with two being translated into English for the first time. (General Fiction)[...]
Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), a literary figure of international acclaim and arguably Austria's greatest post-World War II writer, became the first of his generation to expose unrelentingly his country's pathological denial of complicity in the Holocaust. Bernhard's writings and indeed his own biogra[...]
Internationally acclaimed Austrian novelist, playwright, and memoirist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) has been compared to Kafka and Beckett, and critics have ranked his novels among the masterpieces of the twentieth century. But in fact he began his career in the 1950s as a poet, publishing three book[...]
Beloved Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931 89) began his career in the early 1950s as a poet. Over the next decade, Bernhard wrote thousands of poems and published four volumes of intensely wrought and increasingly personal verse, with such titles as On Earth and in Hell, In Hora Mortis, and Unde[...]
Over the course of three days in 1970, June 5, 6, and7, simply sitting on a white bench in a Hamburg park, Thomas Bernhard delivered a powerful monologue for Three Days (DreiTage), filmmaker Ferry Radax s commanding film portrait of the great Austrian writer. Radax interwove the monologue with a var[...]
At the behest of his surgical mentor, a young Austrian medical student poses as a law student to journey to a remote mining town in order to observe Strauch, an aging painter and brother of his mentor, without letting Strauch know his true occupation, and becomes caught up in the lives of the mad ar[...]
Written with a dark pain and drama that recalls the novels of Dickens, "Gathering Evidence" is a powerful and compelling memoir of youth by one of the twentieth century's most gifted writers.
Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccent[...]
Since the death of Thomas Bernhard in 1989, the literary reputation of this complex and unique writer has risen to the point that he is now regarded as a major European figure. Bernhard emerged in the 1960s as one of Austria's major writers, challenging the popularity of such established writers as [...]
This play is Thomas Bernhard's devastating satire on the business of literature. The novelist Moritz Meister, after years of neglect, has finally achieved the status of Grand Old Man of German literature. With breathtaking regal condescension he receives his minions: a graduate student writing a the[...]
'A bitter fool' King Lear 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 itse[...]
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. He wrote Heldenplatz in 1988 as a response to the fiftiet[...]