Touching the Void (book) Touching the Void (book) Touching the Void is a 1988 book by Joe Simpson, recounting his and Simon Yates' successful but disastrous and nearly fatal climb of the 6,344-metre (20,813 foot) Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. It has sold over a million copies and has been translated into over 20 languages. In 2013 the 25th Anniversary eBook edition of Touching the Void was published by DirectAuthors.com. It features additional photography from the expedition. Simpson and Yates reach the summit of the previously unclimbed West Face of Siula Grande. Upon descent, Simpson slipped down an ice cliff and
On the Mountain On the Mountain On the Mountain is Thomas Bernhard’s first prose work, which he completed in 1959, yet the last of his works to be published, in 1989, the year of his death. Based on autobiographical elements which constitute a kind of encyclopaedic view of Bernhard's world, this book gives a rare insight into the birth of a remarkable literary "oeuvre" paralleling that of Kafka and of Beckett. In fact, Sophie Wilkins, in her "Afterword", compares it to Kafka's short story "Description of a Struggle". Written as one sentence, it is a monologue delivered by a court reporter who meets