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Complete Stories
  • Published: 20 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837314850
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512

Complete Stories

Formats & editions
Hardback
26 Jan 2027
EBook
20 Oct 2026
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Magnetic, psychologically unsparing stories of desire and estrangement, from one of postwar Europe’s greatest writers

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….

Ingeborg Bachmann’s short fiction – each piece a razor-sharp feminist masterpiece, as urgent as a confession – arrives here in full force. This major collection draws together all the stories Bachmann wrote over her lifetime, many appearing in English for the first time.

These are intensely charged tales of power and submission, obsession and shame, which play out in cliff-side hotels, red-lit bars and court trials across postwar Europe. Bachmann follows lonely lovers through their stifled quarrels and private cruelties, where intimacy becomes a prison, language a weapon, and guilt the very air women breathe. As they struggle to make room for their lives within the narrowing confines of 1950s and 60s society, Bachmann exposes the legacy of fascism, lurking so close to the surface.

An undisputed giant of German-language literature, Bachmann’s ‘vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet’ (Guardian).
  • Published: 20 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837314850
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512
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About the author

Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was author, poet and philosopher, writing short stories, radio plays, essays and a novel, Malina. Born in Austria to a Nazi party member, she rose to prominence in the 1950s with writing that grappled with the German language "after Auschwitz". She was the constant subject of media attention for her celebrated writing, her social critique, and her famous affairs. She won all the major German and Austrian literary awards, including the prestigious Georg Buchner prize, and since her death she has been recognized as a significant influence on such writers as Günter Grass, Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, and Peter Handke. The annual Ingeborg Bachmann Prize is one of the most important awards for literature in German.
IB

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Praise for Complete Stories

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.

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

A portrait, in language, of female consciousness, truer than anything written since Sappho’s Fragment 31.

Rachel Kushner

Bachmann’s vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet.

Guardian

Bachmann writes with quicksilver intelligence and intensity ... One of the great pleasures of this excellent collection is the chance to watch her talent develop and her originality come into its own

Kirkus