paper trail

Jul 19, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

Young Haruki Murakami, via Writers and Kitties

Borders has announced plans to liquidate all its remaining stores after negotiations with a private-equity investor collapsed, and they failed to receive any other bids. According to the Wall Street Journal, stores will start closing as soon as Friday, and the chain will go out of business entirely by September. Nearly eleven-thousand people will lose their jobs as a result of the shutdown.

Slavoj Zizek dismisses the rumor that he and Lady Gaga are dating, which was started by a group of “anti-authoritarian communists” and picked up by some New York tabloids.

Colson Whitehead files his first dispatch from the World Series of Poker, and Harper’s excerpts part of his forthcoming novel, Zone One, which will be published in October by Doubleday.

Here are several things you probably didn’t know about David Bowie, from Paul Trynka’s new biography of the British pop icon: A fistfight over a girl left one of Bowie’s pupils permanently dilated; a druggy screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” provided the inspiration for the rocker’s first single, “Space Oddity;” and finally, Bowie won over his wife, the model Iman, with his excellent impersonations.

The Millions releases the first paragraph of Haruki Murakami’s three-volume novel IQ84, which will hit American bookstores this fall: “The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček’s Sinfonietta—probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music.”