About the Author

Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1957 he began a second career, as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, he has become one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation. He published nine novels, an autobiography, one volume of poetry, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of plays. Thomas Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.

Reviews

“Superbly distinctive and provocative. . . . An unusually intense, engrossing literary experience.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Musical, dramatic and set in Vienna, Woodcutters resembles a Strauss operetta with a libretto by Beckett. . . . Bernhard is easily the most original and important writer in German since Gunter Grass.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Bernhard’s narrators are prodigious haters, and yet we love them; they are too brilliant for it to be otherwise.”
—Salon
 
“No other book by Bernhard could possibly constitute a better introduction to his work as a whole. Apart from perfectly illustrating his shrewdness, disgruntlement and acute awareness, Woodcutters is very funny.”
—The Washington Post