The rest is slander

Here is a collection of previously untranslated stories from a master of twentieth-century Austrian literature, Thomas Bernhard. ‘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.