Bad Words: Selected Short Prose

**A moving work of fiction from one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature.** Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga escaped with one of the last *Kindertransporte* to England in 1938. Many of their relatives were deported and murdered. Those losses make themselves felt throughout Aichinger's writing, which since her first and only novel, *The Greater Hope*, in 1948, has highlighted displacement, estrangement, and a sharp skepticism toward language. By 1976, when she published *Bad Words* in German, her writing had become powerfully poetic, dense, and experimental. This volume presents the whole of the original *Bad Words* in English for the first time, along with a selection of Aichinger's other short stories of the period; together, they demonstrate her courageous effort to create and deploy a language unmarred by misleading certainties, preconceived rules, or implicit ideologies.