Download or read book The Voice Imitator written by Thomas Bernhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our times. At once pessimistic and exhilarating, Bernhard's work depicts the corruption of the modern world, the dynamics of totalitarianism, and the interplay of reality and appearance. 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.
Download or read book Histrionics written by Thomas Bernhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-01-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 the "Bernhard period"; John Updike compares Bernhard with Kafka, Grass, Handke, and Weiss. His dark, absurdist plays can be likened to those of Beckett and Pinter, but their cultural and political concerns are distinctly Bernhard's. While Austria's recent political history lends particular credibility to Bernhard's satire, his criticisms are directed at the modern world generally; his plays grapple with questions of totalitarianism and the subjection of the individual and with notions of reality and appearance.
Download or read book The Voice Imitator written by Thomas Bernhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-12-22 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The voice imitator who can impersonate everyone's voice but his own is an important parable for our times...
Download or read book Old Masters written by Thomas Bernhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating. "Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."—Robert Craft, New York Review of Books. "Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."—George Steiner
Download or read book Walking written by Thomas Bernhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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."--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Loser written by Thomas Bernhard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-11-10 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other-- the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator-- has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.
Download or read book Yes written by Thomas Bernhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-11 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer. "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.
Download or read book Frost written by Thomas Bernhard and published by Alfred a Knopf Incorporated. This book was released on 2006 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 artist and a colorful assortment of local characters, in the first English edition of the author's debut novel.
Download or read book Klausen written by Andreas Maier and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobody knows exactly what happened in the small town of Klausen, or rather, everyone knows: a bomb went off, or someone was shooting at the town; it all stems from a fight over measuring noise pollution, or it was the work of eco-terrorists . . . Only one thing is clear: Klausen was now a crime scene.
Download or read book My Work Is Not Yet Done written by Thomas Ligotti and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When junior manager Frank Dominio is suddenly demoted and then sacked it seems there was more than a grain of truth to his persecution fantasies. But as he prepares to even the score with those responsible for his demise, he unwittingly finds an ally in a dark and malevolent force that grants him supernatural powers. Frank takes his revenge in the most ghastly ways imaginable - but there will be a terrible price to pay once his work is done. Destined to be a cult classic, this tale of corporate horror and demonic retribution will strike a chord with anyone who has ever been disgruntled at work.
Download or read book Woodcutters written by Thomas Bernhard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiercely observed, often hilarious, and “reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg” (The New York Times Book Review), this exquisitely controversial novel was initially banned in its author’s homeland. 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.
Download or read book Screen Tests written by Kate Zambreno and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of 2019: Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book Riot, Buzzfeed, Vol. 1 Brooklyn A new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel. In the first half of Kate Zambreno’s astoundingly original collection Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno’s thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them. "If Thomas Bernhard's and Fleur Jaeggy's work had a charming, slightly misanthropic baby—with Diane Arbus as nanny—it would be Screen Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and what it means to be a human looking at humans.”—Amber Sparks “In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with.”—Brian Evenson
Download or read book Liquidation World written by Alexi Kukuljevic and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the disoriented subject of modernity: a dissolute figure who makes an makes an object of its absence; from Baudelaire to Broodthaers. In Liquidation World, Alexi Kukuljevic examines a distinctive form of subjectivity animating the avant-garde: that of the darkly humorous and utterly disoriented subject of modernity, a dissolute figure that makes an art of its own vacancy, an object of its absence. Shorn of the truly rotten illusion that the world is a fulfilling and meaningful place, these subjects identify themselves by a paradoxical disidentification—through the objects that take their places. They have mastered the art of living absently, of making something with nothing. Traversing their own morbid obsessions, they substitute the nonsensical for sense, the ridiculous for the meaningful. Kukuljevic analyzes a series of artistic practices that illuminate this subjectivity, ranging from Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages to Charles Baudelaire's melancholia. He considers the paradox of Duchamp's apparatus in the Stoppages and the strange comedy of Marcel Broodthaers's relation to the readymade; the comic subject in Jacques Vaché and the ridiculous subject in Alfred Jarry; the nihilist in Paul Valéry's Monsieur Teste; Oswald Wiener's interpretation of the dandy; and Charles Baudelaire as a happy melancholic. Along the way, he also touches on the work of Thomas Bernhard, Andy Kaufman, Buster Keaton, and others. Finally, he offers an extended analysis of Danny's escape from his demented father in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Each of these subjects is, in Freud's terms, sick—sick in the specific sense that they assume the absence of meaning and the liquidation of value in the world. They concern themselves with art, without assuming its value or meaning. Utterly debased, fundamentally disoriented, they take the void as their medium.
Download or read book Edge of Irony written by Marjorie Perloff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as "Avant-Garde in a Different Key: Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind," Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 311-38."
Download or read book Voice Imitation written by Elisabeth Zetterholm and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Novellas written by Thomas Bernhard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-06-23 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Bernhard is "one of the masters of contemporary European fiction" (George Steiner); "one of the century's most gifted writers" (New York Newsday); "a virtuoso of rancor and rage" (Bookforum). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard still remains relatively unknown in America. Uninitiated readers should consider Three Novellas a passport to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard. Two of the three novellas here have never before been published in English, and all of them show an early preoccupation with the themes-illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships-that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. Amras, one of his earliest works, tells the story of two brothers, one epileptic, who have survived a family suicide pact and are now living in a ruined tower, struggling with madness, trying either to come fully back to life or finally to die. In Playing Watten, the narrator, a doctor who lost his practice due to morphine abuse, describes a visit paid him by a truck driver who wanted the doctor to return to his habit of playing a game of cards (watten) every Wednesday—a habit that the doctor had interrupted when one of the players killed himself. The last novella, Walking, records the conversations of the 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. Three Novellas offers a superb introduction to the fiction of perhaps the greatest unsung hero of twentieth-century literature. Rarely have the words suffocating, intense, and obsessive been meant so positively.
Download or read book The Son of Mr Suleman written by Eric Jerome Dickey and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named in USA Today's "5 books not to miss," and New York Post's "The best new books to read" From New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey—named one of USA Today’s 100 Black Novelists and Fiction Authors You Should Read—comes his final work: an unflinchingly timely novel about history, hearts, and family. It’s the summer of 2019, and Professor Pi Suleman is a Black man from Memphis with a lot to endure—not only as a Black man in Trump’s America but in his hard-earned career as an adjunct professor. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague’s prejudices and microaggressions. At the same time, he’s being blackmailed by a powerful professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted her, when in fact the truth is just the opposite, trapping him in a he-said-she-said with a white woman that, in this society, Pi knows he will never win. When he meets Gemma Buckingham, a sophisticated entrepreneur who has just moved to Memphis from London to escape a deep heartbreak, things begin to look up. Though Gemma and Pi hail from separate cultures, their differences fuel a fiery and passionate connection that just may consume them both. But Pi’s whirlwind romance is interrupted when his absentee father, a celebrated writer, passes away and Pi is called to Los Angeles to both collect his inheritance and learn about the man who never acknowledged him. With the complicated legacy of his famous father to make sense of, Gemma’s visa expiration date looming, and the threats of his colleague becoming increasingly intense, Pi must figure out who he is and what kind of man he will become in his father’s shadow. In The Son of Mr. Suleman, Eric Jerome Dickey takes readers on a powerful journey exploring racism, colorism, life as a mixed-race person, sexual assault, microaggressions, truth and lies, cultural differences, politics, family legacies, perceptions, the impact of enslavement and Jim Crow, code-switching, the power of death, and the weight of love. It is an extraordinary story, page-turning and intense, and a book only Dickey could write.
