Written in 1980 but published here for the first time, these texts tell the story of the various farces that developed around the literary prizes Thomas Bernhard received in his lifetime.

. . . One of the great works of world literature. Its arrival on these shores is a significant literary event."—Thomas McGonigle, New York Newsday

Thomas Bernhard does not use punctuation --except on one occasion--and we have, of course, done our translation with this in mind.

The narrator, named 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 bouts of madness.

As the story begins, he’s just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair.

"Eve of Retirement" focuses on a triangle from hell: Holler, a Chief Justice and former commandant of a concentration camp and his two sisters - Vera, who dances attention on him to the point of incest, and the left-wing Clara, who sullenly ...

"In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum.

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 ...