Welcome news about an event on Feb. 18 at which you will drink beer and Wayne Koestenbaum, Rhonda Lieberman, Ben Marcus, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Dale Peck will read from and discuss the Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet about whom Ruth Franklin wrote in The New Yorker in December: “The author of eleven novels and more than twenty plays, Bernhard had a well-deserved reputation as the country’s most provocative postwar writer: he spent his career alternately mocking and mourning Austria’s Nazi legacy, which, with typical bluntness, he once represented as a pile of manure on the stage.” From the event announcement:

A reading tribute to Thomas Bernhard

Sunday, February 18, 7:00 p.m.
KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St. (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), 2nd Floor
Free
contact: Jonathan Taylor, jonathandouglastaylor@gmail.com

Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931–89) is not as widely read in the U.S. as he is throughout Europe, but here too, his influence among innovative writers is outsized. Gleefully embracing his role as Austria’s preeminent Nestbeschmutzer (“nest-fouler”), he embroidered his boundless dissatisfaction with existence into monologues that reach a comic fever pitch through relentless exaggeration, repetition and contradiction.

On Feb. 18 at KGB, a group of New York authors will read selections from Bernhard masterpieces including Old Masters, Correction, Yes and Gathering Evidence, and discuss their encounters with his work:

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry, most recently Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films. His next book, Hotel Theory, will be published in spring 2007. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Art.

Rhonda Lieberman, the only woman on this panel, is a New York-based writer, a Contributing Editor of Artforum, a Visiting Critic at the Yale School of Art, and a longtime admirer of Bernhard’s super-crabby oeuvre.

Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women. He has published fiction and essays in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Conjunctions.

Geoffrey O’Brien is the author of Sonata for Jukebox, The Browser’s Ecstasy, and other books.

Dale Peck is a novelist and critic. His new novel, The Garden of Lost and Found, will be published this fall. His favorite Bernhard novels are Old Masters, Concrete, and Woodcutters, although not always in that order.