655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war. 655,000. That’s more than the 400,000 who died at the Battle of Changping. That’s more than twelve times the number of casualties at the Battle of Gettysburg. And it’s getting extremely close to Great Purge levels. And we are responsible. (via Sans Serif)
Year / 2006
National Book Award Finalists
An absolutely splendid list of fiction finalists for this year’s National Book Awards:
Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon)
Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins)
I’ve read three of these books and I have to say that these three will likely end up on my Top 10 list. The nod for Dana Spiotta, in particular, is a great surprise. For those interested in learning more, Ms. Spiotta appeared on Show #28 of The Bat Segundo Show. You can find my thoughts on the book here.
Given how much I’ve talked up Spiotta, Danielewski, and Powers this past year, and given Vollmann’s win last year, I’m wondering if Return of the Reluctant had a small hand in pointing some of the judges in the right direction. And by “small hand,” I refer, of course, to the mysterious checks sent under surreptitious cover to the NBA judges.
You Can’t Go Home Again
“He’d forgotten about midwesterners. He could no longer read them, his people, the residents of the Great Central Flyover. Or rather, his theories about them, honed through his first twenty years of life, had died from lack of longitudindal data. They were, by various estimates, kinder, colder, duller, shrewder, more forthright, more covert, more taciturn, more guarded, and more gregarious than the mode of the country’s bean curve. Or elese they were that mode: the fat, middle part of the graph that fell away to nothing on both coasts. They’d become an alien species to him, although he was one of them, by habit and birth.” — Richard Powers, The Echo Maker
Big Surprise: Quills Lack Thrills
Sarah attends the Quills. Among the sordid details: (1) The ceremony cost a remarkably wasteful $500,000, (2) the awards ceremony was as interminable as the Oscars, (3) American Idol Fantasia Barrino was enlisted to butcher Porgy & Bess, and (4) nobody outside of the publishing industry appears to give a damn about the Quills (the web traffic for the Quills site was so low that nobody could get numbers).
Terry Gilliam Isn’t the Only One Hand Selling
Hollywood Reporter: “Director David Lynch has worked out a deal with French producer Studio Canal to self-distribute his three-hour digital video feature ‘Inland Empire’ in the U.S. and Canada. Producer Mary Sweeney said the plan will ‘explore a new model of distribution,’ which is expected to include theatrical, home video and online venues.”