Two published novels and several short stories into his career, Joshua Ferris has staked a unique place in American literature as a writer whose works re-explore and dismantle otherwise familiar terrain – workplace politics, disease, family dynamics – through experimentation of form. &

The back jackets of much of Thomas Bernhard's English-language translations are burdened by such qualifications as "near genius" or "second only to Kafka and Beckett."  This, of course, is no small praise: there is no shame in being second to Kafka or Beckett; there is no shame in being a "ne