The Austrian playwright, novelist and poet Thomas Bernhard is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time.The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard’s distinct darkly comic voice and vision—often compared to Kafka and Musil—commenting on a corrupted world.

About Book: 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. Martin Chalmer’s outstanding translation captures the essential personality of the work.The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down.Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy yet, as Bernhard writes,‘not completely crazy’. Translated by: Martin Chalmers

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009, The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, lyrical language, Herta Müller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people. This edition is translated by Martin Chalmers, with a new foreword by Paul Bailey. Also by Herta Müller: Nadirs, The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel.