The Post-Office Girl is a profound exploration of human emotions against the backdrop of a commodified world. Christine, a diligent worker in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, finds herself trapped in a country gripped by unemployment and despair.

Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from her affluent American aunt, inviting Christine to a luxurious resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is swept into a world of unimaginable wealth and unleashed desires, feeling utterly transformed: nothing is impossible.

However, this dreamlike existence is abruptly shattered when her aunt cuts her off, sending Christine back to her mundane reality. Back at the post office, she meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disillusioned architect. Together, they are drawn into a relationship marked by deprivation, anger, and shame.

In a world where work, politics, love, and sex seem impossible, Christine and Ferdinand contemplate a desperate and decisive act to secretly remake their world from within.

This haunting novel, completed during the 1930s, captures the essence of a modern master's achievement, blending elements of Cinderella with Bonnie and Clyde in a narrative that is both hard-as-nails and deeply affecting.

Alle sieben Wellen is the continuation of the unusual email love story between Emmi Rothner and Leo Leike, from the novel Gut gegen Nordwind. After nearly a year in Boston, Leo returns home to find messages from Emmi waiting for him. Both realize that their feelings for each other have persisted.

Emmi is still married, and Leo is in a relationship, complicating their decision to finally meet in person. Yet, as Daniel Glattauer teaches us in this romantic tale, when six waves have crashed upon the shore, the seventh is always full of surprises.

It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, 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, a strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and 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 an eulogy to a real-life friendship.

Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in self-exile in Rome. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg.

But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate. Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.

Malina tells the story of lives painfully intertwined: the unnamed narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father, lives with the androgynous Malina, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an ominous influence. Plunging toward its riveting finale, Malina brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between women and men.