Olaf Berwald is Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Professor of German at Kennesaw State University, USA. His most recent book is A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch (2013). Steve Dowden is Professor of German Literature at Brandeis University, USA. He is the author of three previous books, including Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination (1995), and the editor or co-editor of four books, including Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought (2014; co-edited with Thomas P. Quinn).Gregor Thuswaldner is Provost and Executive Vice President at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, USA. His most recent book is The Hermeneutics of Hell: Visions and Representations of the Devil in World Literature (2017).

A masterful set of essays on Bernhard’s oeuvre .... Taken together, the eleven chapters of this book represent some of the best scholarship in English to date on Bernhard’s remarkable impact on the world of postwar. ... There is too little space in a review like this to do justice to the breadth and quality of each of the other contributions. They represent literary scholars from across the major Western languages and have given us an essay collection that’s truly useful: a sophisticated introduction to Bernhard’s echo in Euro-American prose.

• Introduction: The Master of Understatement, or Remembering Schermaier Stephen Dowden (Brandeis University, USA) 1. The Afterlife of Thomas Bernhard in Contemporary Austrian LiteratureKatya Krylova (University of Aberdeen, UK)2. How Not to Begin: Wrestling with Thomas BernhardKata Gellen (Duke University, USA) 3. Bernhard, Sebald, and Photography in Holocaust MemoryAgnes Mueller (University of South Carolina, USA)4. Radical Style: Bernhard, Sontag, KertészStephen Dowden (Brandeis University, USA)5. The Stains of Cultural Inheritance: Thomas Bernhard and Philip RothByron Spring (Lincoln College, University of Oxford, UK)6. Gaddis before Bernhard before GaddisMartin Klebes (University of Oregon, USA)7. Thomas Bernhard, a Writer for SpainHeike Scharm (University of South Florida, USA) 8. Immersions into Bernhard’s Works in Recent Francophone LiteratureOlaf Berwald (Kennesaw State University, USA) 9. Thomas Bernhard's Influence on Gabriel Josipovici's Monologue NovelsGregor Thuswaldner (Whitworth University, USA)10. Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, and Claudio Magris: From Postmodernism to Anti-SemitismSaskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski (Duke University, USA)11. Thomas Bernhard's Extinction: Variations/Variazioni/VariacionesJuliane Werner (University of Vienna, Austria)Notes on Contributors BibliographyIndex