Borders is going bankrupt.
Why do English-language readers of Thomas Bernhard like him in a way that German-language readears don’t? Gideon Lewis-Kraus explains at n+1: “I suspect the chief reason we’ve taken to Bernhard in a way that surprises German-speakers is that we have long been accustomed to the great pleasures of what the English writer Geoff Dyer has called ‘the literature of neurasthenia, of anxiety, fretting, complaint.’”
Senior editor Donovan Hohn has left Harper’s magazine to become a features editor at GQ.
Tonight at the Barnes and Noble in Manhattan's Union Square, Physicist Brian Greene will read from his latest work about string theory, The Hidden Reality, which posits an almost infinite number of universes, as well as strange alternate dimensions. Charles Seife reviewed the book in the latest Bookforum, writing, “This is not an elegant universe; it's a byzantine mess with enormous philosophical implications.”
Whoopi Goldberg is angry with the New York Times, because they didn’t mention her in an article about black actors who have won Oscars. When she complained, the Times offered its most unapologetic “correction” ever: “The error lies with those who are reading the story incorrectly.” Almost as good as our all time favorite NYT correction: “A review on July 19 about Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, by Kiran Desai, misspelled the name of the novel's hero. It is Sampath, not Sanpath. The same review incorrectly identified the character who falls into a vat of broth; it is a spy from an atheist organization, not a monkey or Sampath in the form of a guava.”
