Description: The first English translation of the essays, lectures, and other critical writings of the celebrated Austrian poet, novelist, and public intellectual, one of the most influential postwar writers in German.
Brief description: KAREN R. ACHBERGER is Professor of German at St. Olaf College.
Review Quotes: Though best known today for her poems and novels, Bachmann was a serious student of philosophy, an incisive essayist, and an influential commentator on Europe's postwar intellectual and artistic scene. [This] new volume of her critical writings . . . makes this other dimension of her work available to readers in English for the first time. . . . [T]hough Bachmann felt language to be an obstacle to the full expression of being, only when immersed in it does she feel herself. Achberger and Solibakke help us to see behind this self-imposed curtain. . . . The Critical Writings remind us that Bachmann's utopian pursuit, though cut short, aimed for so much more - and that amid the collapse of proofs in our own day, the salvo of the future remains ours to write.--Peter Filkins "The Boston Review"