austrian literature (ariadne press) - april 14

Gazelle AcademicAustrian Literature

Titles published by Ariadne Press

Adolf Loos

Elfriede Jelinek

Friedrich Torberg

Hilde Spiel

IngeborgBachmann

Joseph Roth

Stefan Zweig

Studies inAustrian

Literature, Culture& Thought

Drama

History

ModernAustrian Prose

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CONTENTS

ADOLF LOOS 2

ELFRIEDE JELINEK 2

FRIEDRICH TORBERG 3

HILDE SPIEL 3

INGEBORG BACHMANN 4

JOSEPH ROTH 5

STEFAN ZWEIG 5

STUDIES IN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE, CULTURE & THOUGHT SERIES 6

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 8

DRAMA 9

HISTORY 10

MODERN AUSTRIAN PROSE 10


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ADOLF LOOS

ON ARCHITECTUREAdolf Loos

Adolf Loos (1870-1933) is recognized today as one of the great masters of modern architecture.He did not leave a unified oeuvre but articles scattered through journals and newspapers. Thiscollection of forty-two articles complements the volume Ornament and Crime. Together thetwo volumes represent more or less the complete writings of Adolf Loos.

PB 9781572410985 £19.99 January 2002 Ariadne Press 203 pages

ORNAMENT & CRIME: Selected EssaysAdolf Loos (Translated by Michael Mitchell)

Contains thirty-six original essays by the celebrated Viennese architect, Adolf Loos (1870-1933).Most deal with questions of design in a wide range of areas, from architecture and furniture, toclothes and jewellery, pottery, plumbing, and printing; others are polemics on craft educationand training, and on design in general. Loos, the great cultural reformer and moralist in thehistory of European architecture and design was always a 'revolutionary against therevolutionaries'. With his assault on Viennese arts and crafts and his conflict with bourgeoismorality, he managed to offend the whole country. His 1908 essay 'Ornament and Crime',mocked by an age in love with its accessories, has come to be recognised as a seminal work incombating the aesthetic imperialism of the turn of the century. Today Loos is recognised as oneof the great masters of modern architecture.


ELFRIEDE JELINEK

ELFRIEDE JELINEK: Framed by LanguageJohns, Ahrens

Despite of the Nobel Prize of Literature and her wide-ranging literary production, ElfriedeJelinek is still not widely known in the English-speaking world. The essays collected heredemonstrate the range and significance of this major literary voice, addressing Jelinek as amaster of modernist prose, of post-modern critiques of literary genres, of stage and screen,and of feminist and antifiscist criticism.



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FRIEDRICH TORBERG

TANTE JOLESCH OR THE DECLINE OF THE WEST IN ANECDOTESFriedrich Torberg

Already a much loved classic in Austria, "Tante Jolesch or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes"is Friedrich Torberg's tribute to the Jewish coffee-house world that flourished in Vienna in theafterglow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until its final collapse in 1938. Based on Torberg'spersonal memories of intellectuals and eccentrics of the time, including Egon Friedell, FritzGrünbaum, Egon Erwin Kisch, Alfred Polgar, and Franz Werfel, this work evokes the storytellingand humour prominent among Vienna's coffee-house denizens. These anecdotes allow one tosee into the lives of assimilated Jews before the Shoah, beginning in the living room of TanteJolesch, revolving around the coffee-house, and extending to summer resorts, sports matches,dinner parties, a psychiatric clinic under the care of Sigmund Freud, and the office of a U.S.consular official in charge of granting visas to the United States.

In this volume, Torberg builds a literary monument to a group of people, a time, and a cultureof which he saw himself as one of the last representatives. Despite being one of the mostprominent Austrian literary figures of the twentieth century, Friedrich Torberg is not wellknown in the English-speaking world. He joined the literary elite of pre-war Austria at the ageof twenty-two, but his career was cut short by the Nazi ban on Jewish writers. Invited by theNew York PEN Club as one of "ten outstanding German anti-Nazi writers", Torberg was able toflee to the United States where he wrote screenplays and articles for German-languagenewspapers. In 1951 Torberg returned to Vienna, where he became a journalist, critic, andtranslator. In 1979 he received the Austrian State Prize for Literature.

PB 9781572411494 £19.99 May 2008 Ariadne Press 240 pages

HILDE SPIEL

THE DARK & THE BRIGHT: Memoirs, 1911-1989 Hilde Spiel

The author, journalist, and grand dame of Austrian literature (as she was known in her ownlifetime), Hilde Spiel, was born in Vienna in 1911. She emigrated to London in 1936, returningto her Austria for the first time in 1946 as correspondent for the New Statesman. Beginningduring her long years of emigration, she created a series of impressive works in both Englishand German novels such as Flute and Drums and The Darkened Room, her biography of Fannyvon Arnstein, several volumes of stories, literary essays and critical works, as well astranslations of works by renowned English poets, novelists and dramatists. For twenty yearsshe was Austrian correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Weltwoche, andfrom 1937 onward an active member of International PEN. She later became general secretaryand then vice-president of Austrian PEN. In the early 1960s she resettled in Austria for good,despite her awareness that the chasm between those who had stayed at home and those whohad emigrated would never again close completely. In her later years she was honoured withseveral important literary prizes. Her memoirs, a microcosm of literary and political life inEurope during the upheavals of the twentieth century, not only vividly portray Hilde Spiel as anindividual and an intellectual of her time, but also convey the conflicting forces in the lives ofEuropeans during and after the years of the Second World War.

PB 9781572411548 £29.50 June 2008 Ariadne Press 444 pages


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RETURN TO VIENNA: A JournalHilde Spiel, Jacqueline Vansant (Translated by Christine Shuttleworth)

In Austrian literary circles, Hilde Spiel (1911-1990) is known as the grande dame of post-warAustrian literature. Published widely in both English and German, she is remembered as a critic,essayist, and prose writer. Spiel left Austria for London in October 1936 to join Peter deMendelssohn, who had asked her to marry him. While her initial move to London was bychoice, the German Anschluss in March 1938 made return to Austria impossible, at least whilethe National Socialists were in power.

In this book Spiel chronicles her return trip to Austria in January 1946, in British uniform as awar correspondent for the New Statesman, after a ten-year absence. The author approachesVienna with feelings of trepidation and estrangement. Expecting a difficult reunion, sheprepares herself mentally. However, her steely resolve is worn down through the confrontationwith her former haunts. As she travels through the city, Spiel compares the post-war ruins andthe population with the city she knew from her youth. The contrast reveals her ambivalencetoward Austria and the Austrians. At the same time, she presents a microcosm of Vienna,highlighting the ways in which many non-Jewish Austrians saw themselves as victims. Return toVienna captures the feelings of a person caught between two worlds, belonging to both and toneither. This position allows Spiel to step back and reflect on both worlds.

PB 9781572411777 £16.50 November 2011 Ariadne Press

INGEBORG BACHMANN

ENIGMA: Selected PoemsIngeborg Bachmann (Translated by Michael Lyons, Patrick Drysdale)

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), an Austrian, is considered to be one of the mostdistinguished German-speaking poets of the years following World War II. As a female poet ofthe twentieth century, she can have had few rivals for the sweep and force of her imagination.She was born in Carinthia, a part of southern Austria close to the borders of Slovenia and Italy.She was from the first aware of frontiers, and much of her poetry is about place, belonging andnot belonging, and about her yearning for a world without borders and above all for a world atpeace. Other themes were her fear of a return to the conditions and attitudes of pre-war lifeand, again and again, the complexity of love - its emotional highs and the bitter pain when itgoes wrong.

This collection is called Enigma, the title of one of the poems. Bachmann herself was enigmatic,both as a person and as a poet. Much of her poetry expresses her feelings in a figurative way,the ideas appearing at a tangent to their underlying meaning, and she loved to play with theintermingling of dream and reality. However her work is not difficult if one simply listens to themusic of the lines and enjoys their wealth of imagery and the energy of their emotionalinvolvement.

This translation has been prepared for the general reader rather than the academic and forstudents of literature who are not fluent in German. The translators have stayed as close aspossible to the meaning of the original and to the forms, rhythms, and general feel of theGerman verse, and they have used rhyme when there is rhyme in the original. They have alsofollowed Bachmann in using a simple, everyday choice of words, avoiding any artificial poeticlanguage.

PB 9781572411814 £13.50 December 2011 Ariadne Press 132 pages


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JOSEPH ROTH

CO-EXISTENT CONTRADICTIONS: Joseph Roth in RetrospectHelen Chambers

As a socialist monarchist, Jewish Catholic, skeptical mystic, and humorous sage, Roth has neverfitted neatly into any one literary or historical category. The essays in this volume, devoted tothe Austrian writer Joseph Roth on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death in Parisin 1939, take a fresh look at his apparent contradictions and demonstrate his contemporaryrelevance as an acute analyst of the relationship between private life and political change.

REVIEWS: "An informative and stimulating collection of essays devoted to an author who,

even today, has not yet been completely understood and properly appreciated for his artisticdiversity." The German Quarterly


STEFAN ZWEIG

BRAZIL: A Land of the FutureStefan Zweig

Based upon his own impressions of Brazil and personal experiences there, the author portrays avast, inviting, fertile land with seemingly endless resources; a history devoid of major wars, inwhich all conflicts are resolved in a spirit of conciliation; the type of society for which he himselflonged, composed of multi-national elements that combine to form a harmonious whole free ofracial tensions, strife, and destructive tendencies; an almost utopian place that seems to standapart from the ills of the modern world while providing refuge from its hostility and hope thatmankind can find a more peaceful direction in the future.


DECISIVE MOMENTS IN HISTORYStefan Zweig

The factors that dictate and change the course of history are primarily the product of thecontributions made by individual lives to the broad pattern of mortal existence. In his collectionof "historical miniatures," Stefan Zweig celebrates the monumental power of the spirit todiscover, to create, to transcend the limits imposed by the temporal and physical environment,while at the same time underlining man's inability to escape from the realities of his ownnature.



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VIENNA SPRING: Early Novellas & StoriesStefan Zweig (Translated by William Ruleman)

Set in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, these early works now published in Englishfor the first time, show that from the beginning of his literary career, Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)was already a master of both the short story and his favored fictional form, the novella. In theshorter pieces, the upper-class intellectual Zweig renders with sympathy some of life's outcasts:a "slow" student driven to violence; two ridiculed factory workers; a prostitute longing for love.Yet his keen perception and wry wit allow him to sidestep the sentimental and arrive at tenderyet stark portrayals. The two novellas, "The Love of Erika Ewald" and "Scarlet Fever" follow thetravails of characters closer in temperament and upbringing to Zweig's own. The first concernsa young pianist whose delicate nature interferes with her sensual fulfillment; the second, agentle medical student struggling to adjust himself to the city's harsh realities. In theseportraits, Zweig presents a theme that would figure not only in his later fiction but also in hisown life as a Jewish writer in the Nazi era: the plight of highly sensitive souls in a crude anduncaring world.

PB 9781572411739 £14.99 July 2011 Ariadne Press 132 pages 140x215mm

STUDIES IN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE, CULTURE & THOUGHT

GENDER & CULTURERosa Mayreder (Translated by Pamela S. Saur)

Rosa Mayreder (1858-1938) of Vienna, Austria, was a major European feminist and peaceactivist as well as an excellent scholar and superb writer. The essays collected in the volumeGender and Culture are well-researched, meticulously argued, and of both historical and lastingsignificance. This volume is the first English translation of a 1923 collection of some of her mostimportant writings.

"Gender and Culture" not only gives eloquent expression to Mayreder's ideologicalcommitment to equality and the rights of women in the family, society, and the professions,but also displays her thorough understanding of gender issues throughout history in Europeansocieties and in the writings of major thinkers and writers over the centuries. Mayrederexplores ideas and viewpoints about gender in a broad context, reaching back to Greek andRoman antiquity as well as tracing developments in Catholic and Protestant church history andinterweaving consideration of the views of philosophers from Augustine and Plato toSchopenhauer and Fichte, the literature of writers such as Goethe and Schiller and intellectualsof her day, including the sex researcher Albert Moll and the Swedish feminist Ellen Key. Theseessays discuss gender as related to love, marriage, eroticism and parenthood against thebackground of European history and culture, presenting a plethora of insights into her timesand many that are still relevant in our day.

PB 9781572411623 £21.99 April 2009 Ariadne Press 266 pages


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IN THE JUNK SHOP & OTHER STORIESAnna O (Translated by Renate Latimer)

Anna O [Bertha Pappenheim] (1859-1936), a friend of Freud's wife in Vienna, is regarded as thefirst patient of psychoanalysis. It was she who invented the concept of "the talking cure" underthe care of Josef Breuer in Vienna, where she was being treated for hysteria, anorexia,paralysis, hallucinations, phantom pregnancy, suicidal thoughts and morphine addiction. Breuerpublished her case history "Frauleine Anna O". in 1895, and it is considered the first significantdocument in the history of psychoanalysis. It is the first case of psychoanalytic literature,introducing Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria.

In 1888 Bertha Pappenheim published (anonymously) her first book of five fairy tales, "LittleStories for Children". These tales have never been translated before, nor have they appeared inGerman since their original publication. They reflect on Pappenheim's treatment, dealing withguilt, evil and death. They are not just for children, but also serve as parables for adult visions.They allowed Pappenheim to be reborn, transformed, serving as a kind of "writing cure".

In 1890 she published another collection of fairy tales, "In the Junk Shop". In these nine tales,nine domestic objects tell their tales of woe and misery to each other, as if they were engagedin a nocturnal therapy session.

After Bertha Pappenheim was "cured" in Vienna, she became a successful social worker, leaderof the German-Jewish Women's movement in Frankfurt, an ardent feminist and translator ofMary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792). Breuer's treatment ofAnna O inspired Freud to write that "on this day (18 November 1882) I first became aware ofthe power of the unconscious".

PB 9781572411654 £14.50 October 2008 Ariadne Press 152 pages

VIENNESE SHORT STORIESVeza Canetti

The rediscovery of the writings of Veza Canetti (1897-1963) was one of the literary events ofthe 1990s in German-speaking Europe. In her stories Canetti shows a taste for the grotesque, acommitment to the underdog, a forensic understanding of the psychology of wives trapped intraditional marriages, as well as wit and irony. "Viennese Short Stories" assembles the fictionCanetti published in her lifetime between 1932-1937 aside from her two novels ("The YellowStreet" and "The Tortoises"). These stories appeared in Viennese newspapers, first thesocialistic Arbeiter-Zeitung and, after its closure, in exile journals and, finally, adopting a ratherdifferent tone and style, in the censored press of the "corporate state" under Chancellor Kurtvon Schuschnigg. She writes about women as wives, daughters, and employees, about working-class children who are taught the harsh rules of middle-class life at an early age, about thestreet violence during the workers' revolt in February 1934, and the lowly status of maids. Herfavourite pseudonym, Veza Magd (maid), showed her allegiance to this marginalised group,whose sense of ethics underscores their dignity, which Canetti champions. She has an acuteeye for the dynamics of power in human relationships, be they based on differences in class orsex or both. She is moralistic and engaged but funny; her stories are traditional rather thanChekhovian in their twists of plot and use of the final punchline.

In his introduction Julian Preece shows how Veza Canetti was an unrivalled observer of the lifeof the Viennese poor on the eve of Nazism. Until now Veza Canetti's literary career wasovershadowed by her more famous husband, Elias Canetti (1905-1994, Nobel Prize, 1981). Hisfailure to tell the world of her work until shortly before his death, made her two novels, threeplays, and short stories even more intriguing.



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WE NEVER SLEEPKathrin Röggla

In this masterfully constructed docu-novel Kathrin Röggla ventures into the dysfunctional, self-contained and self-destructive universe of a New Economy trade convention. Here, the horizonof human potential for feeling, experience, and identity is limited by the language and logic ofbusiness models. Through a hypnotically rhythmic sequencing of polyphonic dialogs, thisexplosive novel reveals how the models of efficiency and performance used to quantifybusiness success turn destructive when used to measure human worth, evaluate humanexperience. Through the conversations of six representative figures, the IT supporter, theonline editor, the senior associate, the key account manager, the partner and the intern, thereader is led deeper into the psychological desert of a labour force that has internalised valuesinimical to both its individual and collective survival. The pressure to perform is driven by thepace of the twenty-four hour work cycle and the frenzied competition motivated by the firstsigns of collapse and panic in the New Economy boom. Going days without sleep is a point ofhonour. There is no quitting time. The novel is both a darkly comedic and deeply disturbingview of the work world in the digital age.

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Kathrin Röggla is an important voice among the New

Generation of Austrian authors. Born in 1971 in Salzburg, Röggla has resided in Berlin since1992. Although her early works were predominantly prose fiction and essays, her recent workhas included radio plays, acoustic installations, theatre pieces and experimental television. Sheis the recipient of the Alexander Sacher-Masoch prize, the Italo-Svevo prize for literature andthe Solothurner prize for literature, among many other literary honours.

PB 9781572411531 £18.50 April 2009 Ariadne Press 211 pages

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

AS LUCK WOULD HAVE ITMy Exile in France & Mexico - Recollections & StoriesBruno Schwebel

Schwebel was ten years old when his family escaped from Vienna in 1938 to seek refuge fromNazi persecution in Paris. After various sojourns in France, they fled to Lisbon, then toCasablanca, and eventually reached Mexico City. A man of many talents Schwebel worked aselectrical engineer, cameraman, advancing to the position of technical director of Mexico'slargest TV network. He also became an actor, folk musician, painter and chess champion. Heexplored his new home country on many trips. These recollections consist of a chronologicalnarrative and ten character portraits. With alert curiosity, calm precision, and a wise touch ofhumour, they tell the poignant story of a remarkable life and its many events.



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DRAMA

IN THE LIONS' DEN & THE PANTHERFelix Mitterer (Translated by Michael Lyons, Patrick Drysdale, Dennis McCort, Victoria Martin)Edited by Dennis McCort

Felix Mitterer's reputation as a European dramatist of the first rank is by now firmlyestablished. With his gift for sketching social milieu in a few salient strokes and creating almostunbearably intense moments of dramatic suspense, he has for over thirty years been rivetingthe attention of viewers on the suffering of such oppressed groups as the aged (Siberia), thementally challenged (No Room for Idiots) and the workingmen and women in thrall to corruptcorporations (One Everyman).

The two plays offered here, In the Lions' Den and The Panther, fall well within the purview ofMitterer's social concerns, portraying as they do, respectively, the plight of the Jews in theThird Reich and, once again, the aged in contemporary society. Yet they also reveal a deeperand more personal thematic vein having to do with the intimate symbiosis of language andindividual identity. In Lions' Den the Jewish protagonist Kirsch affects Tyrolean dialect to createan Aryan persona for survival purposes, in effect corroborating the idealist doctrine, esse estpercipi (to be is to be perceived, as this or that). You are what you can persuade others you are,and God help you if your powers of persuasion fail you! In The Panther the old man's self-image, his very sense of himself, erodes with the chipping-away of age at his memory of thelines that make up Rilke's immortal Dinggedicht. In both plays the bedrock ordering ofexperience imposed by language is strained to the breaking point, leaving the protagoniststeetering on the brink of the abyss that looms just beyond personal identity.

Of his own life the self-effacing Felix Mitterer has said: "Its only unusual aspect is that I becamea writer, that I was saved and others weren't". His words allude obliquely to the grindingpoverty and backbreaking work he had to endure labouring on the farms of the Tyrol as hegrew up. They also convey his solidarity with those "others" who could not make it out of theAlpine ghetto and suggest his deep commitment to make their plight, and that of otheroppressed groups, the driving force of his dramatic art. Felix Mitterer has done what all trueartists do, transformed his personal demons into angels of art. And in tracing, through that art,the correspondence between his own demons and those of society, he masters them, not onlyin himself but in the receptive viewer (or reader) as well.


THE WORLD-FIXERThomas Bernhard

This translation of Thomas Bernhard's Der Weltverbesserer makes a contemporary masterpieceavailable to English language readers for the first time. While echoing the dramatic works ofSamuel Becket, Heiner Müller and Peter Handke, The World-Fixer is quintessentially Bernardianand one of his most stage-worthy plays. Presenting a theme he would explore in the play RitterDene Voss and the novels Wittgenstein's Nephew and The Loser, The World-Fixer revolvesaround a self-centred, self-styled genius loosely patterned on Austrian philosopher LudwigWittgenstein. The protagonist is the author of an obscure philosophical tract ostensiblydesigned to improve the condition of the world, if the world could only understand it. Over thecourse of a day he looks forward to receiving an honorary degree while reflecting on his life andengaging in dysfunctional banter. Combining absurdist comedy with an astute satire ofacademic pomposity, “The World-Fixer” ultimately gives a moving portrait of simple humanfrailty.

HB 9781572411425 £14.50 December 2005 Ariadne Press


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HISTORY

CRIME AT MAYERLING: The Life & Death of Mary VetseraGeorg Markus

"Crime at Mayerling" deals with two of the most sensational crimes committed during the pastcentury. Although separated in time by a hundred years, the two events are inextricablyconnected. In January 1889 the corpses of Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary,and the Baroness Mary Vetsera were discovered in the prince's hunting lodge at Mayerling,near Vienna. The circumstances were hushed up and for decades scientists and historians hadbeen trying to solve the mystery of what had happened at Mayerling. An Austrian "Mayerlingbuff" felt compelled to reach an explanation in his own way: in December 1992 he stole thecoffin with the Baroness's remains and had them examined by forensic specialists. Markusdescribes the remarkable findings which finally resolve the mystery of Mayerling.


INTRODUCING AUSTRIA: A Short HistoryLonnie Johnson

The historian Lonnie Johnson provides in compact form a comprehensive overview of Austria'srich past and present. Each chapter and subchapter approaches Austria's diverse, thousand-year-old heritage from a different perspective to illuminate its essential features. In detailingAustria's turbulent history from 1918 to the present, controversial issues are presentedobjectively and without oversimplification. Overall the book conveys a differentiated picture ofthe country and its people which gives readers a feeling for the continuity and change of theAustrian idea.


MODERN AUSTRIAN PROSE

ANYONE CAN SAY “I”: Tales from the End of the Post-War EraRobert Menasse (Translated by Thomas S. Hansen, Abby J. Hansen)

Robert Menasse, who was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1954, speaks with the voice ofthe generation known as Nachgeborene ("those born after"). Although fortunate to haveescaped the persecution and exile his parents endured, Menasse's stories constantly refract thesuffering of the past through the ironic distance of a feeling observer. His critically humorousvoice uncovers surprising truths about himself and the past. As the author of over twentybooks, which include critical essays on contemporary cultural topics as well as novels and shortstories, Menasse's fame as a major figure in contemporary Austrian literature is firmlyestablished. He has received many prestigious literary prizes and divides his time betweenVienna and Amsterdam.



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BEYOND VIENNA: Contemporary Literature From the Austrian ProvincesTodd C. Hanlin

For centuries, Vienna had been the imperial residence and capital of the great multi-lingual,multi-national Habsburg Empire, and thus a magnet for the accumulation of power, prestige,wealth, and beauty. However, it is self-evident that not everyone could or should reside in thecapital, that many talented authors, whether by choice or by chance, lived outside thatglamorous city, in Kafka's words, far from the Imperial sun.

At the outset of the twenty-first century, with technological advancements in transportationand communication with international publishing houses and chain bookstores, with e-mail andthe Internet, for example is there any social, political, economic, or professional advantage toresiding in Vienna, or has it become irrelevant today where artists live? Are their lifeexperiences notably different, whether they reside in the capital or in any other city, large orsmall? Are authors choices of language or themes influenced by their provincial backgrounds?Thus the idea of "Beyond Vienna" is a compelling and timely topic.

This volume will attempt to address these questions, while serving as an introduction to nineauthors poets, novelists, and dramatists and their relationships to the capital: Xaver Bayer,Alois Brandstetter, Gloria Kaiser, Christine Lavant, Anna Mitgutsch, Felix Mitterer, ElisabethReichart, Vladimir Vertlib, and Friedrich Ch. Zauner. The contributors are respected scholarswho were personally invited to join this project and who ultimately determined which authorswould be included.

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Todd C. Hanlin is professor emeritus of German at the

University of Arkansas and has published a monograph on Franz Kafka. He has written onHofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Peter Turrini, Peter Henisch, Paulus Hochgatterer, and translatednovels by Anton Fuchs, Gustav Ernst, Gerald Szyszkowitz, Georg Potyka, and Peter Steiner, playsby Szyszkowitz and Felix Mitterer, as well as a volume on The Best of Austrian Science Fiction.


BLINDING MOMENTGert Jonke

Writing from his background as a conservatory-trained musician and his lifelong passion GertJonke (born in 1946) has produced literary works in every genre involving the lives and works ofvarious composers. This volume includes four pieces in several forms -- a prose poem in tributeto Olivier Messiaen's great piano work "Catalogue d'oiseaux", which gives the title to the piece;a short story in the form of recollections by George Frederick Handel during the last hours ofhis life; a play (Gentle Rage) in which Ludwig van Beethoven figures as the alternatelydespondent and triumphant main character; and a novella whose point of departure is thebizarre, accidental shooting death of Anton Webern in 1945 (Blinding Moment).

PB 9781572411562 £17.50 March 2009 Ariadne Press 200 pages


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FROZEN TIMEAnna Kim

The narrator of Anna Kim's novel Frozen Time is a relatively inexperienced researcher workingfor the Red Cross agency that assists people from the former Yugoslavia in their search for lostrelatives. As she helps a man from Kosovo whose wife disappeared during the war there, she isconfronted with the gruesome results of the work of forensic archaeologists, medics andanthropologists. She is gradually drawn into the fate of her client on a more personal level andeventually accompanies him to Kosovo, where she sees the results of the conflict at first hand.But the documentary aspect is merely the surface of the novel. Beneath it Kim explores,through her narrator, the devastating effect of loss on those left behind, their helplessness astheir lives continue in 'frozen time'.


MODERN AUSTRIAN PROSE: Interpretations & Insights (Volume 1)Paul F. Dvorak

The sixteen articles compiled here are devoted to individual prose works published after 1970that reflect the "Austrian tradition" within the field of German literature. The works treatedinclude those of the popular and widely recognisable names of world-renowned writers such asPeter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti aswell as of less well-known figures. Collectively these authors display a distinctly Austrian pointof view: they are the literary voice of modern-day Austria, a country whose cultural and artisticachievements are often too casually subsumed under the more general "German" rubric. Theauthors and their works clearly demonstrate that Austria has made and continues to make aunique contribution to modern German-language literature and to world literature that isgreatly disproportionate to its modest size and population. The essays in this volume have beenwritten by experts in the field of Austrian cultural and literary studies. With but one exception,the works they present are readily available in English translation. The essays reveal a variety ofinterpretative perspectives but all share the common goal of explicating a single literary text fora diverse readership interested in the modern literary scene.


MODERN AUSTRIAN PROSE: Interpretations & Insights (Volume 2)Paul F. Dvorak

Volume II continues the goal of introducing readers to significant works of modern Austrianprose within the broader field of German-language literature. Written in English with Germanreference material appended in order to appeal to the widest possible audience, the articlescollected here cover major works by contemporary writers. Counted among the well-established authors who could not be included in the first volume are such notable writers asNorbert Gstrein, Elisabeth Reichart, Erich Hackl, Barbara Frischmuth, and Gert Jonke. This groupis complemented by a cohort of more recent authors who have established themselves withinAustria and beyond within the last twenty years. They include, among others, Doron Rabinovici,Lilian Faschinger, Gloria Kaiser, Anna Mitgutsch, Paulus Hochgatterer, Marlene Streeruwitz,Kathrin Röggla, and Dimitre Dinev. All of these authors are linked by language, history, andculture that ties them to a distinctly “Austrian” perspective. Reflecting the strong presence ofthe female voice within contemporary Austrian letters, roughly half of the authors representedare female.

PB 9781572411616 £29.50 September 2011 Ariadne Press 357 pages 140x215mm


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THE SEARCH FOR MDoron Rabinovici

The plot of "The Search for M" revolves around the lives in contemporary Vienna of twogenerations of European Jews, the survivors of the Holocaust and their children. Members ofthe first generation of survivors, their own sense of identity severely undermined by history,are capable of passing on to their offspring only a very fragile sense of worth and belonging.The lives of two main characters of the second generation illustrate the result of this legacy.Dani Morgenthau's sense of self boundaries is so weak that he suffers as an adult from apathological compulsion to claim the guilt of criminals. Arieh Arthur Bein exploits a similarpsychological defect in his work as an agent for the Israeli secret service. With only the barestof evidence to go on, he seeks out and exposes enemies of the Israeli state, setting them up forthe assassin's bullet. The novel reaches for at least a tentative resolution when the lives ofthese two figures intersect.

PB 9781572410886 £16.50 August 2000 Ariadne Press 192 pages

UNREDEEMED PASTThemes of War and Womanhood in the Works of Post-World War II AustrianWomen Writers.Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner

This book gives voice to experiences by Austrian and Austrian Jewish women during World WarII and the Holocaust through a social and historical reading of fiction, creative non-fiction, andmemoirs by post-World War II Austrian women writers. Texts by women who were exiled toChina or Great Britain, girls and women struggling to survive on the home front, activists in theAustrian resistance, and informed second- and third-generation chroniclers reveal deeplypersonal stories of ordinary girls and women facing extraordinary times. Their stories bearwitness to the past and contribute to reshaping Austria's history and its national identity in thetwenty-first century. The volume will engage and inform all readers with an interest in women'shistory and literature, Holocaust studies, and Austrian studies.



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WE ARE DOING FINEArno Geiger, Wolfgang Nehring (Translated by Maria Poglitsch Bauer)

We read to explore the unknown, but also to recognize ourselves in others. Arno Geiger's WeAre Doing Fine offers both pleasures. This fourth novel (winner of the German Book Prize 2005)of the 1968-born Austrian writer highlights events in the lives of three generations of aViennese family as viewed through the eyes of Philipp, who has inherited the villa of hisrecently deceased grandmother. While cleaning - no gutting - the house and ridding it of mostreminders of its former occupants, the grandson is forced to think about his family more than isto his liking.

In a brilliantly sparse and precise language, Geiger mixes crucial incidents of Austrian historywith both everyday and tragic occurrences in the family's private lives. His ear for and empathywith the characters, particularly the women in the story, is exceptional. A dysfunctional familyemerges and is even more poignant because the specific Austrian background only makes theuniversal in such families more apparent. Philipp is following family tradition when he tries tomake clear to his married girlfriend that he neither knows much nor wants to find out moreabout his family.

This is the crux of We Are Doing Fine and the reason why it has more than regional appeal.Austrians have sometimes been accused of having a selective memory, of an aptitude to glossover uncomfortable truths, and of a penchant for appearances. Geiger's characters display allof these characteristics to various degrees, but one cannot help but notice that suchshortcomings are by now shared by most of society as we know it. Maybe one only can make itthrough the day when one surfs the surface and when one uses a pat response to all inquiriesabout one's general state of being: "We are doing fine".

PB 9781572411708 £26.99 July 2011 Ariadne Press 316 pages 140x215mm

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