Killing Stella

Main description: Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, the narrator of KILLING STELLA recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, she worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard, who flits from one adulterous affair to another, about her son’s gloomy demeanor and her daughter’s obliviousness to everything, and, most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has just met a sudden and disastrous end.

A domestic horror story that builds to an apocalyptic ending, KILLING STELLA distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel THE WALL into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella. 

"It is not often that you can say only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular will understand the heroine’s loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy." -- Doris Lessing
"Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. I know of no closer study in claustrophobia and liberation, and of an independence whose severity is at once ecstatic and doomed." -- Nicole Krauss
"Haushofer’s sentences are simple and concise, and full of careful thought. The ideas she expresses are so important that you wonder how you have managed to get by without them." -- Missouri Williams - The Nation
"This potent 1958 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer (The Wall) takes the form of a mother's agitated confession. … Haushofer vividly evokes Anna's shame, fear, numbness, regret, and anger, revealing the depths of claustrophobic unhappiness in her household. This one hits hard." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970) was an Austrian author of short stories, novels, radio plays, and children’s books. Her work has had a strong influence on many German-language writers, such as the Nobel Prize–winner Elfriede Jelinek, who dedicated one of her plays to her. The Wall was adapted into the 2012 film, directed by Julian Pölsler and starring Martina Gedeck. Shaun Whiteside’s translations from the German include classics by Freud, Musil, and Nietzsche.

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