The magnum opus of 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek-a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria

"The surface of [Jelinek's] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek's novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable."-Dustin Illingworth, Washington Post

The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria's scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site.

Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident. As the three slip in and out of the hotel, engaging unsuspecting tourists and seeking a way to return to life, the soil begins to crack under their feet as the dead of the Holocaust awaken: zombies determined to exact their revenge.

Scrupulously rendered for the first time in English by Gitta Honegger, The Children of the Dead takes readers on a mind-bending ride through time, space, and memory. Concocted from experimental theater, splatter film, Gothic literature, philosophy, religion, and more, Jelinek's phantasmagorical masterwork is a fierce confrontation with our fraught legacies in the name of the innocent dead.

Review: "The surface of [Jelinek's] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek's novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable."-Dustin Illingworth, Washington Post

"An unlikely spin on zombie narratives [with] searching questions about how a society decides to remember-or forget-its worst atrocities."-Financial Times, "Best Summer Books of 2024"

"Children of the Dead is a tale of death, disgust, and despair. But it's no bummer; it is playful and proudly strange. And it offers a forceful riposte to a culture-one both historical and contemporary-that abjures the buried and the bygone. . . . A serious, complex work that exemplifies both [Jelinek's] stylistic dexterity and her powerful sway as a social and political critic."-John Semley, The Nation

"In this monumental zombie novel from Nobel winner Jelinek . . . readers will delight in Jelinek's wild Joycean wordplay, elegantly translated by Honegger. . . . Full of unexpected beauty, this challenging and troubling story is one to savor."-Publishers Weekly

Praise for Elfriede Jelinek:

"Jelinek's work is brave, adventurous, witty, antagonistic and devastatingly right about the sorriness of human existence, and her contempt is expressed with surprising chirpiness: it's a wild ride."-Lucy Ellmann, The Guardian

"Language and life and its values-its debts and deaths, its violence and vicissitudes, the dense cacophony of its hidden meanings-are at the core of Jelinek's monumental oeuvre. . . . A Jelinek book is a visceral reading experience, one that provokes a passionate response."-Rhian Sasseen, The Point

"Like her Austrian forebears, including Karl Kraus, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Peter Handke, Jelinek investigates the uses and abuses of language by staging its semantic slipperiness. . . . As the Nobel Committee put it, Jelinek's novels and plays 'reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power,' deconstructing and de-naturalizing the-in her words-'trivial myths' on which large stretches of Western culture are founded."-Xan Holt, Music and Literature

"Jelinek tells hard stories with a concerned but cold eye. . . . [She writes] with cinematic detail, but few of the sentimental filters or cushions that pop culture movies use to spare the nerves of audiences."-New York Times

"An intensely learned and literary writer; all her texts live in and through the texts of others. . . What Jelinek has fashioned [in Greed] is an immensely expressive medium that goes to the very edge of coherence, but never beyond it."-Nicholas Spice, London Review of Books