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Book Summary and Reviews of Ingeborg Bachmann by Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann by Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann

The Complete Stories

by Ingeborg Bachmann

  • Publishes:
  • Oct 20, 2026, 512 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

For the first time in English, all the short fiction that Ingeborg Bachmann wrote in her lifetime in a single volume.

Complete Stories spans three decades of work from one of the most important German-language writers of the last century. Each of these short stories, beautifully translated by Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis, depict people at a crossroads, facing decisions about life, truth, love, and death. In addition to the collections "Three Paths to the Lake" and "The Thirtieth Year," this volume includes many stories that have never appeared in English before.

In this collection, we find Ingeborg Bachmann exploring the limits of language and experience, grappling with the maladies of modern civilization, with love and sex, with patriarchy and its brutalities: "Where does fascism begin? It doesn't begin with the first bombs that were dropped. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman…."

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Bachmann writes in a Cubist prose of sudden cutoffs and reconnections that is acute and moving. She manages to convey that women are playing out the Europe of their time and before their time." ―The New Yorker

"Bachmann's voice is rare and strong―strong enough to transport us to a new domain of fiction." ―Los Angeles Review of Books

This information about Ingeborg Bachmann was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century. Her poems, plays, stories, and her only finished novel, Malina, have been championed by Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.

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