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.From the Hardcover edition.

The last work of fiction by one of the twentieth century's greatest artists, "Extinction "is widely considered Thomas Bernhard's magnum opus. Franz-Josef Murau--the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family--lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg. And he must decide its fate. Written in the seamless, mesmerizing style for which Bernhard wasfamous, "Extinction" is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.

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).Reviews“Certain books—few—assert literary importance instantly, profoundly. This is one of those—a book of mysterious dark beauty.”— Los Angeles Times“A masterpiece. . . . [Bernhard’s] world is so powerfully imagined that it can seem to surround you like little else in literature.”— The New Yorker“Something of a tour-de-force.”— The Washington Post“Where rage of this intensity is directed outward, we often find the sociopath, where inward, the suicide. Where it breaks out laterally, onto the page, we sometimes find a most unsettling artistic vision.”—Sven Birkerts, The New Republic

It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality--a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and great fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein's Nephew is both a meditation on the artist's struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and a stunning--if not haunting--eulogy to a real-life friendship.