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Via Steve over at This Space:

In May 2010, the first translation of Thomas Bernhard's early stories is due from Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The website provides the following information: "First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard’s early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer’s outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes 'not completely crazy.'"

Stephen Mitchelmore on Thomas Bernhard -- my then completely empty house:

Today, the 11th day of this dark month, marks twenty years since the death of Thomas Bernhard. As I wrote in an essay to mark the tenth anniversary, the promise of an early demise from TB was necessary to his work. "Death is close to me now and so is winter" he wrote in his twenties. February is also his birth month.

What remains to be said about Thomas Bernhard? Sometimes, in the ten years since that indulgent essay meant to promote a writer who then demanded promotion, I have sensed a damaging influence; not only in the seductive, liberating style but also in the excess, the exaggeration of which he was so exaggeratedly proud. Yet then I read his story In Rome (translated Kenneth J. Northcott), in which Bernhard remembers Ingebord Bachmann, and these regrets fall away, replaced by gratitude. (More...)

Good news from This Space:

German publishing house Suhrkamp has promised a "sensational release" during next year's Thomas Bernhard year. The publishing house will release Meine Preise (My Awards), a previously-unpublished prose text from 1980 (more...)

"I've been stuck in the elevator, suspended in utter coffin blackness somewhere between the third and fourth floors—listening to the cables quiver, and every so often hearing the distant shouts of emergency workers saying, Hang in there buddy! or what sounds like a very heavy wrench clanking on assorted beams as it tumbles into the abyss—and even though my laptop’s on, it sheds no light...”

That’s one of Ed Park’s ever-suffering office workers trapped inside an elevator and typing a long love-letter in the void. It’s a single block of text banged out on a busted laptop-computer, the breathless conclusion to his first-novel, Personal Days.

In addition to dreaming up this surreal fable about contemporary cubicle culture, Ed Park is a founding editor at The Believer and literary blogger over at The Dizzies. He’s our special guest this week, explaining how he wrote his this book and giving us a glimpse into the mind of an editor.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:

The final third of your book makes use of one of my favorite literary forms--for a lack of better term, I'll call it the long, one-sentence stream-of-consciousness slam-bam prose style. As far as I know,  no writer has ever given specific advice about how to handle this tricky form. How did you do it? 

Ed Park:
The final section is both my favorite part of the book and the one that caused me the most agony. I knew, relatively early on in the composition process, that the final portion of the book would be, at last, in the voice of a single, identifiable character. Continue reading...