A quarter-century after he death, Ingeborg Bachmann's renderings of some of the more subdued horrors of human relations remain scathing. This book reveals her unusually sensitive understanding of the roots of desperation." -Review of Contemporary Fiction"This translation . . . will make available to English readers texts reaffirming Bachmann's place as a fiercely clairvoyant writer." -Publishers Weekly"Reading Ingeborg Bachmann necessarily entails abandoning the terms of one's own comfort, following in her enterprise of seeing everything, covering over nothing that might terrify or make the ordinary life impossible to live . . . And yet, in the beauty of her images, in her belief in a merciful natural order-from which the moral, thinking human is almost entirely cut off-there is tremendous affirmation of the world." -New York Times Book Review

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Austria in 1926. A winner of numerous awards, including the Georg Buchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Literature Prize, and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature, she died in Rome in an apartment fire in 1973.Peter Filkins is an associate professor of English at Simon's Rock College of Bard. He is the author of What She Knew and the translator of Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, winner of an ALTA Award for Outstanding Translation.