Free Thomas Bernhard

That is, Thomas Bernhard for free.

The Lunatics The Inmates by Thomas Bernhard, now available in a special web-translation, courtesy of Conjunctions.

What follows is James Reidel's translation of a sixteen-page poem written early in Thomas Bernhard's career and originally published privately. Though not all of Bernhard's obsessions surface in the poem--the prose passages in particular possess the logic and the structure of thought that would characterize Bernhard's first novel Frost and the novels that followed it. For this e-chapbook, every attempt has been made to preserve the original (and sometimes eccentric) spacing and pagination of the original.

We would like to acknowledge Bernhard's publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, for their willingness to allow us to reprint this poem on the internet.

I don't know if anyone around here is into Bernhard's novels... I continue to be amazed by them. Extinction. Or The Loser. Or even Gargoyles. Any favorites out there in the blogosphere?