Rechnitz, and the Merchant's Contracts

"For much of her career, Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, her work is difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume all the more valuable. In Rechnitz (The Exterminating Angel), a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual event that took place near the Austrian-Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. More than a docu-drama, this work explores the very transmission of historic memory and has been called Jelinek's best performance text to date. In The Merchant's Contracts, Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In the age of the global economy, Jelinek turns the story of a merchant of Vienna into a universal comedy of errors, making this her most accessible work"--Jacket.