Both of these stories are remarkable. I particularly liked "The Book of Franza", finding Franza to be a very intelligent and introspective heroine in a painful marriage. "Requiem" was similarly written, and Bachmann's style is unlike anything else I have read. Bachmann writes with considerable detail and originality, but her prose retains its clarity despite this, and both books are easily enjoyed. It is a shame that Bachmann is no longer around, for these two books demonstrate a quality that isn't always present in modern literature

I've always wanted to know each of the secrets behind writing with a more pronounced sense of power and clarity. In less than one week, Beyond The Rules taught me how to write with fire and a veteran sense of wit. A writer's personality is based on his or her level of word choice and style. The ability to convert these talents to never before seen levels is truly what makes Beyond The Rules a must-read for anyone looking to develop both a unique and original approach to writing.

After hearing Hotschnig perform a reading of his novel at my campus, I rushed out to buy his book. It turned out to be a wonderful, dramatic story of a young man who joins an ambulance service to become closely involved with an accident victim. Hotschnig's description of the "suicides" which the ambulance service has to continuously rescue at a bridge is shocking. Overall, the ending promises a twist to reality which delivers an excelent read.

I couldn't even begin to speak of the value of Bachmann's poetry, personal and phenomenological as it is; can only be silent on the subject of its beauty. The two stars in this review are all hers, and the three missing are because Peter Filkins has made a tremendous effort to misconstrue and mutilate every line she wrote, leaving a horrible, pedantic, confused and leaden mess of English doggerel to stand in for her richly efficient Austrian-German poetic. If you can read German, all the German is here, so by all means buy the book and treasure it; if you can't, consider her poems as yet untranslated. May not be the worst abuse to good poetry I've seen (neither is the Hamburger Celan, although that's also pretty strange), considering that I don't for instance read Chinese -- but it's the one that has caused me the most genuine anger and frustration.

I don't think Filkins' translation was in poor faith; he appears to be a poet himself, which is surprising, and he does take pains to retain word order from the German and, most jarringly, preserve rhyme schemes. (Remember high school "translations" of Chaucer? Oh, the grief...) But there are just as many flat-out semantic errors in translation as ingenious attempts at preservation, and it's clear he has no intuition for Bachmann's thought patterns and her ear for sound. Here's hoping someone who does eventually replaces this "standard" text with a more sensitive rendering.

For the record, this reviewer has disagreed strongly with everything Susan Sontag has said about Central European literature, notably Peter Nadas' "A Book of Memories."