Thomas Bernhard
A matter of life and death: Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, by Patrick Cottrell, reviewed
Five years after his brother’s supposed suicide, Dan Moran receives a puzzling anonymous letter, plunging him back into full investigative mode
Looking on in anger: Happiness and Love, by Zoe Dubno, reviewed
A nameless woman, joining former friends after a funeral, is left speechless with fury at their vanity and pretensions
The novel that makes Ulysses look positively inviting: The Aesthetics of Resistance, by Philip Weiss, reviewed
Weiss’s meandering, 1,000-page magnum opus may be the least entertaining fiction ever written – though no one reads such a work for laughs
The beauty and tedium of the works of Adalbert Stifter
The 19th-century Austrian was an astonishingly pure stylist, as W.G. Sebald acknowledges – but it takes real dedication to craft to write such boring novels
