Children of the Dead

Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946), an Austrian poet, playwright, novelist, and activist, received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her numerous works include the novel The Piano Teacher. She lives in Vienna. Gitta Honegger is an award-winning translator. She lives in Santa Fe, NM.

“The surface of [Jelinek’s] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek’s novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable.”—Dustin Illingworth, Washington Post“An unlikely spin on zombie narratives [with] searching questions about how a society decides to remember—or forget—its worst atrocities.”—Financial Times, “Best Summer Books of 2024”“Children of the Dead is a tale of death, disgust, and despair. But it’s no bummer; it is playful and proudly strange. And it offers a forceful riposte to a culture—one both historical and contemporary—that abjures the buried and the bygone. . . . A serious, complex work that exemplifies both [Jelinek’s] stylistic dexterity and her powerful sway as a social and political critic.”—John Semley, The Nation“In this monumental zombie novel from Nobel winner Jelinek . . . readers will delight in Jelinek’s wild Joycean wordplay, elegantly translated by Honegger. . . . Full of unexpected beauty, this challenging and troubling story is one to savor.”—Publishers Weekly“Elfriede Jelinek’s formidable fiction may be the boldest, most uncompromising novel in contemporary European literature.”—Paul Kane, Jildy Sauce (blog)Praise for Elfriede Jelinek:  “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.”—Lucy Ellmann, The Guardian  “Language and life and its values—its debts and deaths, its violence and vicissitudes, the dense cacophony of its hidden meanings—are at the core of Jelinek’s monumental oeuvre. . . . A Jelinek book is a visceral reading experience, one that provokes a passionate response.”—Rhian Sasseen, The Point  “Like her Austrian forebears, including Karl Kraus, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Peter Handke, Jelinek investigates the uses and abuses of language by staging its semantic slipperiness. . . . As the Nobel Committee put it, Jelinek’s novels and plays ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power,’ deconstructing and de-naturalizing the—in her words—'trivial myths’ on which large stretches of Western culture are founded.”—Xan Holt, Music and Literature  “Jelinek tells hard stories with a concerned but cold eye. . . . [She writes] with cinematic detail, but few of the sentimental filters or cushions that pop culture movies use to spare the nerves of audiences.”—New York Times  “An intensely learned and literary writer; all her texts live in and through the texts of others. . . What Jelinek has fashioned [in Greed] is an immensely expressive medium that goes to the very edge of coherence, but never beyond it.”—Nicholas Spice, London Review of Books