Description

Ingeborg Bachmann’s short fiction – each piece a razor-sharp feminist masterpiece, as urgent as a confession – arrives here in full force. This major collection draws together all the stories Bachmann wrote over her lifetime, many appearing in English for the first time.

These are intensely charged tales of power and submission, obsession and shame, which play out in cliff-side hotels, red-lit bars and court trials in Vienna, Rome and Paris. Bachmann follows lonely lovers through their stifled quarrels and private cruelties, where intimacy becomes a prison, language a weapon, and guilt the very air women breathe. As they struggle to make room for their lives within the narrowing confines of 1950s and 60s society, Bachmann exposes the legacy of fascism, lurking so close to the surface.

An undisputed giant of German-language literature, Bachmann’s ‘vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet’ (Guardian).

Publisher Review

Bachmann’s vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet. * Guardian * Bachmann writes in a Cubist prose of sudden cutoffs and reconnections that is acute and moving. She manages to convey that women are playing out the Europe of their time and before their time. * New Yorker * Bachmann’s voice is rare and strong-strong enough to transport us to a new domain of fiction. * Los Angeles Review of Books * A portrait, in language, of female consciousness, truer than anything written since Sappho’s Fragment 31. — Rachel Kushner