alexfg1/Literature_Nobel_Prize_Data huggingface dataset:
Journals: 1928-1939 by André Gide (University of Illinois Press, 2000)
Genre: Biography & Autobiography

Beginning with a single entry for the year 1889, when he was twenty, and continuing intermittently but indefatigably through his life, theJournals of Andr Gideconstitute an enlightening, moving, and endlessly fascinating chronicle of creative energy and conviction. Astutely and thoroughly annotated by Justin O'Brien in consultation with Gide himself, this translation is the definitive edition of Gide's complete journals.The complete journals, representing sixty years of a varied life, testify to a disciplined intelligence in a constantly maturing thought. These pages contain aesthetic appreciations, philosophic reflections, sustained literary criticism, notes for the composition of his works, details of his personal life and spiritual conflicts, accounts of his extensive travels, and comments on the political and social events of the day, from the Dreyfus case to the German occupation. Gide records his progress as a writer and a reader as well as his contacts and conversations with the bright lights of contemporary Europe, from Paul Valry, Paul Claudel, Lon Blum, and Auguste Rodin to Marcel Proust, Stephen Mallarm, Oscar Wilde, and Nadia Boulanger. Devoid of affectation, alternately overtaken by depression and animated by a sense of urgency and hunger for literature and beauty, Gide read voraciously, corresponded voluminously, and thought profoundly, always questioning and doubting in search of the unadulterated truth. "The only drama that really interests me and that I should always be willing to depict anew," he wrote, "is the debate of the individual with whatever keeps him from being authentic, with whatever is opposed to his integrity, to his integration. Most often the obstacle is within him. And all the rest is merely accidental."
Journals: 1914-1927 by André Gide (University of Illinois Press, 2000)
Genre: Biography & Autobiography

Presents the author's journals that testify a disciplined intelligence in a constantly maturing thought. This book offers details of his personal life and spiritual conflicts, accounts of his travels, and comments on the political and social events of the day, from the Dreyfus case to the German occupation.
Journals: 1939-1949 by André Gide (University of Illinois Press, 2000)
Genre: Biography & Autobiography

Beginning with a single entry For The year 1889, when he was twenty, and continuing intermittently but indefatigably through his life, theJournals of Andr Gideconstitute an enlightening, moving, and endlessly fascinating chronicle of creative energy and conviction. Astutely and thoroughly annotated by Justin O'Brien in consultation with Gide himself, this translation is the definitive edition of Gide's complete journals.The complete journals, representing sixty years of a varied life, testify to a disciplined intelligence in a constantly maturing thought. These pages contain aesthetic appreciations, philosophic reflections, sustained literary criticism, notes For The composition of his works, details of his personal life and spiritual conflicts, accounts of his extensive travels, and comments on the political and social events of the day, from the Dreyfus case To The German occupation. Gide records his progress as a writer and a reader as well as his contacts and conversations with the bright lights of contemporary Europe, from Paul Valry, Paul Claudel, Lon Blum, and Auguste Rodin to Marcel Proust, Stephen Mallarm, Oscar Wilde, and Nadia Boulanger. Devoid of affectation, alternately overtaken by depression and animated by a sense of urgency and hunger for literature and beauty, Gide read voraciously, corresponded voluminously, and thought profoundly, always questioning and doubting in search of the unadulterated truth. "The only drama that really interests me and that I should always be willing to depict anew," he wrote, "is the debate of the individual with whatever keeps him from being authentic, with whatever is opposed to his integrity, To his integration. Most often the obstacle is within him. And all the rest is merely accidental."Volume 4 reveals a creative mind that remains vigorous and unique as Gide enters his seventies. He records the fall of France And The German occupation during World War II, The landing of the Americans And The fall of Tunis, As well as a memorable meeting with General de Gaulle. His literary commentary touches on such writers as Virgil, Goethe, Racine, Dashiell Hammett, and John Steinbeck.
The White Notebook by André Gide (Open Road Media, 2012-02-14)
Genre: Fiction

This work lays bare the early brilliance and philosophical conflicts of André Gide, a towering figure in French literature Nobel Prize–winning writer André Gide lays bare his adolescent psyche in this early work, first conceived and published as part of his novel The Notebooks of André Walter, completed when he was just twenty years old. This profoundly personal work draws heavily on his religious upbringing and private journals to tell the story of a young man who, like the author, pines for his forbidden love, cousin Emmanuelle. This unique portrait of Gide as a young man presents the passions and conflicts, temptations and anguish he would explore in maturity.
The Immoralist by André Gide (Courier Corporation, 1996-07-11)
Genre: Fiction

Set in an Algerian village, a young man, Michel, challenges the prevailing morality in his search for self-fulfillment.
The Notebooks of André Walter by André Gide (Open Road Media, 2012-02-14)
Genre: Fiction

DIVThis debut work lays bare the early brilliance and philosophical conflicts of André Gide, a towering figure in French literature/divDIV /divDIVAndré Gide, one of the masters of French literature, captures the essence of the philosophical Romantic in this profoundly personal first novel, completed when he was just twenty years old. Drawing heavily on his religious upbringing and private journals, The Notebooks of André Walter—with its “white” and “black” halves—tells the story of a young man pining for his forbidden love, cousin Emmanuelle. But his evocative memories and devoted yearnings, carefully crafted through quotations and diary excerpts, lead only to madness and death./divDIV /divDIVAnnotated with footnotes from translator and scholar Wade Baskin, this story within a story offers a unique portrait of the artist as a young man, as it reveals the key themes of self-analysis and moral conscience that Gide explores in his mature works./div
Strait is the Gate by André Gide (Mondial, 2007)
Genre: Fiction

"Strait is the Gate", first published in 1909 in France as "La Porte etroite", is a novel about the failure of love in the face of the narrowness of the moral philosophy of Protestantism. --- André Gide (1869 - 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career spanned from the symbolist movement to the advent of anticolonialism in between the two World Wars. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, without at the same time betraying one's values... --- "For Gide was very different from the picture most people had of him. He was the very reverse of an aesthete, and, as a writer, had nothing in common with the doctrine of art for art's sake. He was a man deeply involved in a specific struggle, a specific fight, who never wrote a line which he did not think was of service to the cause he had at heart." (Francois Mauriac)
So Forth by Joseph Brodsky (Macmillan, 1998-03-04)
Genre: Poetry

Joseph Brodsky's last volume of poems in English represents eight years of masterful self-translation from the Russian, as well as a substantial body of work written directly in English.
Joseph Brodsky by Joseph Brodsky (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002)
Genre: Biography & Autobiography

Biography -- Literary Criticism Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared emigre into, as he himself termed it, "a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen." In interviews from 1972 to 1995, Joseph Brodsky: Conversations covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. Brodsky's poetry earned him a Nobel, and his essays won him awards and international acclaim. This volume shows that there was a third medium, in addition to poetry and essays, in which Brodsky excelled--the interview. Although he said that "in principle prose is simply spilling some beans, which poetry sort of contains in a tight pod," he nevertheless emerges as an extraordinary and inventive conversationalist. This volume includes not only his notable interviews that helped consolidate Brodsky's international reputation but also early and hard-to-find interviews in journals that have since disappeared. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Cortland Review, and Stanford Magazine. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Washington Post, and the Georgia Review.
Watermark: An Essay on Venice by Joseph Brodsky (Penguin UK, 2013-02-28)
Genre: Travel

'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street Journal Watermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many winters, as he remembers friends, lovers and enemies he has encountered. Above all, he reflects with great poetic force on how the rising tide of time affects city and inhabitants alike. Watermark is an unforgettable piece of writing, and a wonderful evocation of a remarkable, unique city. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Collected Poems in English by Joseph Brodsky (Macmillan, 2002-04)
Genre: Poetry

With nearly 200 poems, several of them never before published in book form, this is the essential volume of the Nobel Laureate's work.
Selected Poems, 1968-1996 by Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020-05-12)
Genre: Poetry

Joseph Brodsky spent his life advocating for the place of the poet in society. As Derek Walcott said of him, “Joseph was somebody who lived poetry . . . He saw being a poet as being a sacred calling.” The poems in this volume span Brodsky’s career, which was marked by his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, they represent the project that, as Brodsky said, the “condition we call exile” presented: “to set the next man—however theoretical he and his needs may be—a bit more free.” This edition, edited and introduced by Brodsky’s literary executor, Ann Kjellberg, includes poems translated by Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht, as well as poems written in English or translated by the author himself. Selected Poems, 1968-1996 surveys Brodsky’s tumultuous life and illustrious career and showcases his most notable and poignant work as a poet.
A Part of Speech by Joseph Brodsky (Macmillan, 1980)
Genre: Poetry

A Part of Speech contains poems from the years 1965-1978, translated by various hands.
Brodsky by Joseph Brodsky (Baskerville Publishers, Inc., 2004)
Genre: Biography & Autobiography

Brodsky was a friend of the author's family and confided his thoughts and feelings to her, as well as poetry in progress, over more than thirty years both before and after their emigration. Includes never before published poems and numerous photographs.
On Grief and Reason by Joseph Brodsky (Macmillan, 1995)
Genre: Literary Collections

"On Grief and Reason c"ollects the essays Joseph Brodsky wrote between his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and his death in January 1996. The volume includes his Nobel lecture; essays on the condition of exile, the nature of history, the art of reading, and the notion of the poet as an inveterate DonGiovanni; his "Immodest Proposal" for the future of poetry, written when he was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States; a consideration of the poetry of Robert Frost; Brodsky's searching estimations of Hardy, Horace, and Rilke; and an affecting memoir of Stephen Spender.
Doubling the Point by J. M. Coetzee (Harvard University Press, 1992)
Genre: History

Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his vision goes to the nerve-centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer's mastery of tension and elegance. Doubling the Point takes the reader to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee's longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography.
The Pole: A Novel by J. M. Coetzee (Liveright Publishing, 2023-09-19)
Genre: Fiction

One of Vanity Fair's "Best Books of the Fall" From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace, a psychologically probing, compulsively readable novel about love and the mutability of human relationships. Renowned for his sparse yet powerful prose, J. M. Coetzee is unquestionably among the most influential—and provocative—authors of our time. With characteristic insight and a “brittle wit that forces our attention on the common terrors we don’t want to think about” (Washington Post), Coetzee here challenges us to interrogate our preconceptions not only of love, but of truth itself. Exacting yet unpredictable, pithy yet complex, Coetzee’s The Pole tells the story of Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a vigorous, extravagantly white-haired pianist and interpreter of Chopin who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his concert in Barcelona. Although Beatriz, a married woman, is initially unimpressed by Wittold and his “gleaming dentures,” she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into his world. As the journeyman performer sends her countless letters, extends invitations to travel, and even visits her husband’s summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, though only on Beatriz’s terms. The power struggle between them intensifies, eventually escalating into a full-fledged battle of the sexes. But is it Beatriz who limits their passion by paralyzing her emotions? Or is it Wittold, the old man at his typewriter, trying to force into life his dream of love? Reinventing the all-encompassing love of the poet Dante for his Beatrice, Coetzee exposes the fundamentally enigmatic nature of romance, showing how a chance meeting between strangers—even “a Pole, a man of seventy, a vigorous seventy,” and a stultified “banker’s wife who occupies her days in good works”—can suddenly change everything. Reminiscent of James Joyce’s “The Dead” in its exploration of love and loss, The Pole, with lean prose and surprising feints, is a haunting work, evoking the “inexhaustible palette of sensations, from blind love to compassion” (Berna González Harbour, El País) typical of Coetzee’s finest novels.
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (Penguin, 2017-01-03)
Genre: Fiction

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced. Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point. Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.
Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee (Penguin, 2017-01-03)
Genre: Fiction

From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.
The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee (Penguin, 2017-06-06)
Genre: Fiction

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost—and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy—Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.
Three Stories by J. M. Coetzee (Text Publishing, 2014-10-22)
Genre: Fiction

As he gets older he finds himself growing more and more crabby about language, about slack usage, falling standards. Falling in love, for instance. 'We fell in love with the house', friends of his say. How can you fall in love with a house when the house cannot love you back, he wants to reply? Once you start falling in love with objects, what will be left of real love, love as it used to be? But no one seems to care. People fall in love with tapestries, with old cars. A man contemplates his deep connection to a house. The unfathomable idea of threshing wheat points to a life lost. And a writer ponders the creation of his narrator. Three Stories—'His Man and He’, written as Coetzee’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, ‘A House in Spain’ and ‘Nietverloren’—is the work of a master at his peak. These are stories that embody the essence of our existence.
In the Heart of the Country by J. M. Coetzee (Penguin, 2017-05-30)
Genre: Fiction

A story told in prose as feverishly rich as William Faulkner's, In the Heart of the Country is a work of irresistable power. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. On a remote farm in South Africa, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's fierce and passionate novel watches the life from which she has been excluded. Ignored by her callous father, scorned and feared by his servants, she is a bitterly intelligent woman whose outward meekness disguises a desperate resolve not to become "one of the forgotten ones of history." When her father takes an African mistress, that resolve precipitates an act of vengeance that suggests a chemical reaction between the colonizer and the colonized—and between European yearnings and the vastness and solitude of Africa. With vast assurance and an unerring eye, J. M. Coetzee has turned the family romance into a mirror of the colonial experience.
The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee (Penguin, 2013-09-03)
Genre: Fiction

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of Waiting for the Barbarians, The Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace. Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee returns with a haunting and surprising novel about childhood and destiny that is sure to rank with his classic novels. Separated from his mother as a passenger on a boat bound for a new land, David is a boy who is quite literally adrift. The piece of paper explaining his situation is lost, but a fellow passenger, Simón, vows to look after the boy. When the boat docks, David and Simón are issued new names, new birthdays, and virtually a whole new life. Strangers in a strange land, knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognize her at first sight. “But after we find her,” David asks, “what are we here for?” An eerie allegorical tale told largely through dialogue, The Childhood of Jesus is a literary feat—a novel of ideas that is also a tender, compelling narrative. Coetzee’s many fans will celebrate his return while new readers will find The Childhood of Jesus an intriguing introduction to the work of a true master.
Scenes from Provincial Life by J. M. Coetzee (Penguin, 2012-04-24)
Genre: Fiction

The Nobel Prize–winning author's brilliant trilogy of fictionalized memoirs—now available in one volume for the first time. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. Few writers have won as much critical acclaim and as many admirers in the literary world as J. M. Coetzee. Yet the celebrated author rarely spoke of himself until the 1997 arrival of Boyhood, a masterly and evocative tale of a young writer's beginnings. Continuing with the fiercely tender Youth and the innovative Summertime, Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers.
Greed by Elfriede Jelinek (Profile Books, 2010-10-01)
Genre: Fiction

Kurt Janisch is an ambitious, but frustrated country policeman. Things are not going right in his life - at least not fast enough. But a country policeman gets talking to a lot of people in the line of duty - particularly women. Lonely, middle-aged women, women with a bit of property perhaps... Matters go from bad to worse: for Kurt Janisch, for the women who fall for him. Someone sees too much, knows too much. Soon there's a body in a lake and a murderer to be caught. A thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, Greed is Elfriede Jelinek's most accessible novel since The Piano Teacher. But as always Jelinek gives the reader a lot more to think about: the ecological costs of affluence, the inescapable burden and inadequacy of our everyday words, the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, the impossibility of life without relationships. A meditative reflection on ageing, Greed is another chapter in Jelinek?s chronicling of her love/hate relationship with Austria.
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek (Grove Press, 2009)
Genre: Fiction

38-year-old Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, still lives with her domineering mother. Erika has a weakness for buying clothing that she will never actually wear, secretly visits Turkish peep shows and watches sadomasochistic films. When a handsome, self-absorbed 17-year-old student attempts to seduce Erika, she resists, but the relationship between teacher and pupil spirals rapidly out of control, and Erika becomes consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction.
Einar by Elfriede Jelinek (Post Apollo Press, 2006)
Genre: N/A

Cultural Writing. Drama. Translated from the German by P.J. Blumenthal. "Elfriede Jelinek, who was born in 1946 in Murzzuschlag, Austria, is the most verbally powerful writer in present-day German-language literature. Her works and public statements continue to provoke disparate reactions. In 2004 Jelinek received the Nobel Prize for literature, and this decision also caused considerable controversy within the German-speaking sphere as well as internationally. In 1998, the German writer and director Einar Schleef staged Jelinek's most important drama Sportstuck for the Vienna City Theater. The production of an additional Jelinek piece was interrupted by Schleef's illness. To everyone's surprise, he died shortly thereafter. Subsequently Jelinek ventured to compose three portraits of Schleef, which P. J. Blumenthal has translated for this little volume. They show Jelinek at the height of her powers, with her inimitable, musically overflowing, irony-infected style of exaggeration, and will awaken curiosity about her work, as well as about the figure of Einar Schleef, who still remains completely unknown in the English-speaking world"--Hans-Ulrich Muller-Schwefe.
Greed by Elfriede Jelinek (Seven Stories Press, 2011-01-04)
Genre: Fiction

From the Nobel Prize-winning author .... Greed is the story of Kurt Janisch, an ambitious but frustrated country policeman, and the lonely women he seduces. It is a thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, where the investigation of a dead girl’s body in a lake leads to the discovery of more than a single crime. In her signature style, Jelinek chronicles the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, and the cruelties of everyday life.
Sports Play by Elfriede Jelinek (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012-07-16)
Genre: Drama

With translation assistance and a foreword by Karen Juers-Munby First produced in 1998 at the famous Vienna Burgtheater, the remarkable and provocative Sports Play by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek is a postdramatic theatrical exploration of the making, marketing and sale of the human body and of emotions in sport. It explores contemporary society’s obsession with fitness and body culture bringing into sharp focus our need to belong to a group, a team or a nation. Sport is seen as a form of war in peacetime.
On the Royal Road by Elfriede Jelinek (Gazebo Books, 2021-04-01)
Genre: Fiction

Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek is known as a writer who works in response to contemporary crises and cultural phenomena. Perhaps none of her works display that quality as clearly as On the Royal Road. Three weeks after Donald Trump's election, Jelinek mailed her German editor the first draft of this monologue, which turns out to be a stunningly prescient response to Trump and what he represents. In this drama we discover that a 'king', blinded by himself, who has made a fortune with real estate, golf courses and casinos, suddenly rules the United States, and the rest of the people of the world rub their eyes in disbelief until no one sees anything anymore. On the Royal Road brings into focus the phenomenon of right-wing populism. Carefully perched somewhere between tragedy and grotesque, high-pitched and squeamish, Jelinek in this work questions her own position and forms of resistance. 'Ms. Jelinek's play is a screed of outrage at the political, economic and cultural forces that have brought us to an unprecedented — and for many, unimaginable — moment of crisis for modern democracy. Mr. Trump is never mentioned by name, but the narration sketches an undisciplined, uncouth monarch who has been propped up by obscene wealth, a nonstop media circus and a remarkable talent for self-aggrandizing...[On the Royal Road] is neither a polemic nor a historical dramatization but an of-the-moment allegory for our deeply troubling political, social and economic reality.' — A. J. Goldmann, New York Times 'Jelinek's work is brave, adventurous, witty, antagonistic and devastatingly right about the sorriness of human existence, and her contempt is expressed with surprising chirpiness: it's a wild ride.' — The Guardian
Fury by Elfriede Jelinek (N/A, 2022-03-22)
Genre: N/A

A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo's offices in Paris. In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine's editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective. In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries. With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.
Three Plays by Elfriede Jelinek (N/A, 2019)
Genre: Jews

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek's plays are difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes "Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel," "The Merchant's Contracts" and "Charges (The Supplicants)" all the more valuable. In "Rechnitz," a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. In "The Merchant's Contracts," Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In "Charges (The Supplicants)," Jelinek offers a powerful analysis of the plight of refugees, from ancient times to the present. She responds to the immeasurable suffering among those fleeing death, destruction, and political suppression in their home countries and, drawing on sources as widely separated in time and intent as up-to-the-minute blog postings and Aeschylus's "The Supplicants," Jelinek asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral, and personal obligations they impose on us.
Charges (the Supplicants) by Elfriede Jelinek (German List - (Seagull Titles CHUP), 2016)
Genre: Refugees

In recent years, the refugee problem has become impossible to ignore, as multiple crises in the Middle East and Africa have driven thousands of desperate people to attempt Mediterranean crossings in hopes of reaching Europe, and safety. Many have died en route, and those who make it face a far from certain future, as European governments have proved reluctant to fully acknowledge, let alone commit to ameliorating, their plight. In Charges (The Supplicants), Nobel Prize-winning writer Elfriede Jelinek offers a powerful analysis of the plight of refugees, from ancient times to the present. She responds to the immeasurable suffering among those fleeing death, destruction, and political suppression in their home countries and, drawing on sources as widely separated in time and intent as up-to-the-minute blog postings and Aeschylus's "The Supplicants," Jelinek asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral, and personal obligations they impose on us. Looking at the global refugee crisis of our current moment, she analyzes challenges to the political, social, and psychological realities in safe, comfortable Western countries, exploring what everyday language and media coverage reveal about Western perceptions of refugees. In a world where insecurity seems to spread by the day, Charges (The Supplicants)is a timely, unflinching account of how we treat those who come to us in need.
Women as Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek (Masks, 1994)
Genre: Fiction

In Austria, two women get their man. Brigitte resorts to sex to ensnare Heinz-the-electrician, Paula uses good food to land Erich-the-woodcutter. Unfortunately, by the time wedding bells ring, both women are a little tired of their catch.