Bernhard on NPR?

Somewhat surprisingly, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser is one of NPR’s ‘You Must Read This’ summer picks. Claire Messud (“She has commented, about her current life, ‘Who knew there could be so much poop?’”) picked it.

Then I picked up The Loser, and was not only mesmerized, and horrified, but felt, also, profoundly spoken to: here was a book — a ranting monologue, more naturally than a novel — obsessing unflinchingly about the things that have always obsessed me. About art, and ambition, and failure, and delusion, and death.