These unfinished novels were intended to follow her widely acclaimed Malina in a Proustian cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted on women by men, and upon the living by history, politics, religion, family, and the self.

"Reading Ingeborg Bachmann necessarily entails abandoning the terms of one's own comfort, following in her enterprise of seeing everything, covering over nothing that might terrify or make the ordinary life impossible to live . . . And yet, in the beauty of her images, in her belief in a merciful natural order--from which the moral, thinking human is almost entirely cut off--there is tremendous affirmation of the world."  —New York Times Book Review

"This translation . . . will make available to English readers texts reaffirming Bachmann's place as a fiercely clairvoyant writer." —Publishers Weekly

"The crimes committed against Franza and Fanny are injustices of representation— injustices that attend to cruel thoughts as well as cruel words, to gossip and gaslighting and the production of biographically parasitic novels generally . . . Amassing evidence of men’s bad intentions and their even worse writing, Bachmann’s novels sought restitution for the women whom men had claimed first as their subjects, then as their victims."  —New York Review of Books