{"product_id":"prose-seagull-world-literature-9781906497569","title":"Prose (Seagull World Literature)","description":"\u003cp\u003eHis manner of speaking  like that of all the subordinated  excluded  was awkward  like a body full of wounds  into which at any time anyone can strew salt  yet so insistent  that it is painful to listen to him  from The Carpenter The Austrian playwright  novelist  and poet Thomas Bernhard (193189) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhards distinct darkly comic voice and visionoften compared to Kafka and Musilcommenting on a corrupted world. First published in German in 1967  these stories were written at the same time as Bernhards early novels Frost  Gargoyles  and The Lime Works  and they display the same obsessions  restlessness  and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmers outstanding translation  which renders the work in English for the first time  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 memoryand the mere words  the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy  but yet  as Bernhard writes not completely crazy. Bernhards glorious talent for bleak existential monologues is second only to Becketts  and seems to have sprung up fully mature in his mesmerizing debut.From Publishers Weekly  on Frost The feeling grows that Thomas Bernhard is the most original  concentrated novelist writing in German. His connections . . . with the great constellation of Kafka  Musil  and Broch become ever clearer. George Steiner  Times Literary Supplement  on Gargoyles\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45960553627701,"sku":"ByrdShop_1906497567","price":72.56,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781906497569.jpg?v=1788290837","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/prose-seagull-world-literature-9781906497569","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}