Books like Korrektur by Thomas Bernhard

A timeless tale of a prince visiting Earth to learn about adults and human folly.

Alice, a curious girl, follows a rabbit into Wonderland and the Looking‑Glass world, meeting eccentric characters like the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s celebrated children’s fantasy.

Candide: A Tale of Conviviality and Optimism in a Wretched World

A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells sketches a perfect, pollution‑free society where individuals contribute to the common good under careful political oversight, raising questions about equality, progress, and the limits of an ideal world.

Jean‑Jacques Rousseau confesses his life in a candid, introspective style, revealing his thoughts, feelings and experiences in a personal yet philosophical narrative.

Sir Francis Bacon’s incomplete utopian work, _New Atlantis_, envisions a visionary society where scientific inquiry and humanitarian values coexist, embodied in the imagined island of Bensalem and its pioneering research institution, the Salomon's House.

Marian Taylor begins a governess position at Gaze Castle, a remote coastal estate, where she encounters strange mysteries and a drama beyond her understanding.

29, 311 p. 24 cm

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target. Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

Three lovers and comrades vie for happiness in a ruined chateau near Avignon, battling madness, eerie obsessions, and demonic forces that threaten their fragile love triangles.

In The Voice Imitator, translated by Kenneth Northcott, Bernhard gives us one of his most darkly comic works. A series of parable-like anecdotes - some drawn from newspaper reports, some from conversation, some from hearsay - this satire is both subtle and acerbic. What initially appear to be quaint little stories indict the sterility and callousness of modern life, not just in urban centers but everywhere. Bernhard presents an ordinary world careening into absurdity and disaster. Politicians, professionals, tourists, civil servants - the usual victims of Bernhard's inspired misanthropy - succumb one after another to madness, mishap, or suicide.