This book describes eight experiments with sustainable transport options which are analysed in the context of established travel practice and car ownership and the problems they pose, and the tends in transport technology and policy.
Understanding the significance of genetic factors for our lives requires an analysis that goes beyond biological aspects. It is especially necessary to take into account how human beings relate to others and to themselves. Who we are is a result of social action and the ways in which human beings constitute themselves as subjects. Seen from this perspective, genetic medicine is a social practice that shapes how we think about us, how we conduct our behaviour and how we care for our children. This book scrutinises practices by which individuals become knowledgeable about their genes and constitute them as responsible decision makers.
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.
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.
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.
Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in Rome in self-exile. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate. Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius. "Strangely gripping. The glue that holds his remarkable novel together is the unique virtuosity of his imaginative prose, a highly original kind of writing that resembles musical patterns of theme, variations and recapitulation."—Steve Dowden, Washington Times "With a breathtaking sustained intensity . . . Bernhard assaults through the voice of Murau the modern world as exemplified by his birthplace, Austria."—Thomas McGonigle, Chicago Tribune Books "Perfectly balanced and continually interesting. . . . The particular fineness of Extinction lies in its depiction of a consciousness in action."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "Bernhard's distinctive style . . . is caught with quite remarkable fidelity in David McLintock's excellent translation . . . . The work of a master."—W.E. Yates, New York Times Book Review "When Thomas Bernhard died, Austria lost one of its bravest authors . . . . David McLintock's translation . . . is exquisite. It presents an English far richer than most English language books . . . . Fresh, disturbed and punchy."—Benjamin Weissman, Los Angeles Times
Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his ‘really marvelous’ house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns out to be the site of someone else’s very real horror story. A brilliant and haunting tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, Concrete is a perfect example of why Thomas Bernhard is remembered as “one of the masters of contemporary European fiction” (George Steiner).
Bernhard's imaginary account of a friendship with the pianist Glenn Gould explores the soul of the artist and the world of isolation, solitude, and obsession that often accompanies genius
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.
First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels Frost, Gargoyles and The Lime Works and they display the same obsessions, restlessness and disarming mastery of language.
A gathering of brilliant and viciously funny recollections from one of the twentieth century’s most famous literary enfants terribles. 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. Whether it was the Bremen Literature Prize, the Grillparzer Prize, or the Austrian State Prize, his participation in the acceptance ceremony—always less than gracious, it must be said—resulted in scandal (only at the awarding of the prize from Austria’s Federal Chamber of Commerce did Bernhard feel at home: he received that one, he said, in recognition of the great example he set for shopkeeping apprentices). And the remuneration connected with the prizes presented him with opportunities for adventure—of the new-house and luxury-car variety. Here is a portrait of the writer as a prizewinner: laconic, sardonic, and shaking his head with biting amusement at the world and at himself. A revelatory work of dazzling comedy, the pinnacle of Bernhardian art.
LRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY ANNE ENRIGHT, AUTHOR OF THE ACTRESS 'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann 'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove Knausgaard An unnamed writer arrives at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife: a couple he once admired, but has now come to detest. They have been brought together by their friend Joana's suicide, but the guest of honour, a famous actor from the Burgtheatre, is late. As the guests await his arrival, little do they know that they are being subjected to the narrator's merciless scrutiny from his wing-backed throne, the targets of a tirade of epic, frenzied proportions. When the star actor finally arrives, he ushers in an explosive end to the evening that is impossible to see coming. Originally banned in Thomas Bernhard's homeland, Woodcutters brutally exposes the hollow pretentiousness of the Austrian bourgeoisie in an unforgettable firework display of humour and horror - newly illuminated by Anne Enright's afterword.
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.
For five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he’s just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. The murder and the bizarre life that led to it are the subject of a mass of hearsay related by an unnamed life-insurance salesman in a narrative as mazy, byzantine, and mysterious as the lime works—Konrad’s sanctuary and tomb.
The first English translation of the earliest poetry of brilliant and disruptive Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, widely considered one of the most innovative and original authors of the twentieth century and often associated with fellow mavericks Beckett, Kafka and Dostoevsky. A master of language, whose body of work was described in a New York Times book review as "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," Bernhard's On Earth and in Hell offers a distilled perspective on the essence of his artistry and his theme of death as the only reality. A remarkable achievement by highly-respected translator Peter Waugh.
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. In "Ungenach," the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In "The Weatherproof Cape," a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. "Midland in Stilfs" casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In "At the Ortler," two middle-aged brothers--one a scientist, the other an acrobat--meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in "At the Timberline," the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.
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