Month / January 2007

by Edward Champion

NBCC, Take Note

A few people have criticized yesterday’s post, pointing out that the NBCC fiction nominees are about celebrating “the best” or “the most noteworthy books of the year,” with the idea that it doesn’t matter if an author has received accolades or not.

This is a fair point, but what is “the best” about exactly? Since we know that the NBCC created a committee and spent an entire day settling upon these mostly lackluster candidates, one must ask whether “the best” are genuinely being sought through the NBCC’s current consensus approach. Did the NBCC Board Members even talk about a book like Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y or was it simply not in its collective radar because one of the judges doesn’t read books set in a dimensional universe? Was this really a matter of delving deep for “the best” or settling upon a group of ten pretty good books that everyone had already read?

Is not celebrating literature the act of submerging one’s self across a broad spectrum, particularly areas that run counter to one’s interests?

Finding “the best,” in my view, means plunging into books in direct conflict with one’s sensibilities, while simultaneously embracing those established (and deserved) voices that speak to the collective timbre. It can be done. It was done with the National Book Awards, and one need look no further than this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist to find another eclectic array. The list includes a genre staple like M. John Harrison, while recognizing a left-field candidate like Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart.

by Edward Champion

BREAKING: Perseus Makes PGW Offer

Publishers Weekly: “The Perseus Books Group made it official this morning, announcing that it had made an offer to acquire “substantially” all of the distribution contracts of PGW, the distribution unit of bankrupt AMS. As previously reported here, Perseus is offering to pay all PGW clients 70% of the money owed to them by PGW, but not paid because of the Chapter 11 filing, in exchange for taking over distribution. In addition, Perseus will pay PGW’s operating costs for a five-month transition period following closing of the agreement. The deal is subject to approval by the bankruptcy court, and AMS will file a motion later this week to get that approval.”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • The Writers with Drinks event went very well. My hazy memory involves the mike stand, the words, wild gesticulations on my part, and an onyx expanse of faces and laughs. The far clearer memory: I will never think of erotica quite the same way thanks to the gloriously scatological Justin Chin. You can get the full scoop on what went down from Ms. Anders, the hostess with the mostest.
  • When any other employee doesn’t do his job, he’s shitcanned on the spot. But if you work at Newsweek, if you don’t finish a book under review, you can write an explanation why. You don’t have to read the article. All you need to know is that the dog ate Malcolm Jones’ homework and that it’s clear that Jones forged a sick note from his parents, but somehow Jones isn’t serving detention for it. (via Orthofer)
  • Salman Rushdie believes that “extremism will die a natural death.” Of course, given that it often takes artificial tactics such as war, terrorism, and assorted military interventions to stub out extremism, I find it difficult to believe that extremism will die of natural causes.
  • The Columbus Dispatch chats with Alice Hoffman.
  • Chris Abani refers to MLK as “Martin,” because he wants people to understand that King was a man. I was unaware that there were some scholars out there who understand King as a woman, but I would be curious to discern their findings. I feel uncomfortable referring to someone I haven’t met by their first name. Come on, Abani. It’s not as if you had dinner with the guy.
  • Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai has been called “a damned Paki.” Perhaps the solution to the UK racism problem, which I understand also creeped up during a recent installment of Big Brother, is to simply call the entire population “damned Pakis.” Why not initiate a Ministry of Human Understanding? An institution that will hire government-hired men to go door to door and call each and every citizen a “damned Paki,” whether they like it or not. Then people will begin to see the absurdity of identifying someone by ethnicity or skin color (and damning it), and perhaps there will be less of this uncivilized nonsense.
  • Apparently, 2007 has been declared “the year of Vonnegut.”
  • Thanks to DNA sampling, scholars have detected a lost work from Coleridge.
by Edward Champion

The New York Masturbatory Sock Puppet Review of Books

Once again, Sam Tanenhaus demonstrates how little he cares about journalistic integrity by throwing a bone to Lee Siegel this week. You might remember Siegel as “sprezzatura,” a sock puppet alter ego he created to leave comments on his very own posts to defend against criticism of his New Republic blog. Why Siegel is so obsessed with masturbation in Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Siegel has had a lot of time off to consider this subject. But seeing as how Tanenhaus sets the bar so low, I wouldn’t be surprised if “sprezzatura” will show up in two weeks’ time in the Letters section.

However, there’s also another delightful appearance from Liesl, who somehow managed to slip in references to the White Stripes (and, alas, Coldplay), Medea, and Dostoevsky. Perhaps Levi is right. Tanenhaus must have been on vacation.

by Edward Champion

NBCC: We Take No Chances

The National Book Critics Circle Awards nominations are up. And it’s clear to me that the NBCC’s fundamental goal here is to play things safer than a dinner for four at the Olive Garden. The NBCC awards were once the place to find books representing literary innovation (witness the 2005 list of finalists, which included Gaitskill, Ishiguro and Vollmann). But what we have this year is Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy and Kiran Desai: authors who have already received considerable plaudits. It’s good to see Adichie on the list. She’s the only fictive sparkle here, the underrated book that the NBCC should remind readers about. But in a year that included Ngugi wa Thiong’O’s Wizard of the Crow and Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y, rewarding Dave Eggers for his “philanthropy”-as-opportunism strikes me as a disingenuous commendation, about as honorable as nominating Michael Moore agitprop for a distinguished film award. And when you compare these finalists against the National Book Award finalists, one begins to wonder if it’s the National Book Foundation that’s the real champion of tomes that rock the boat.

Of course, there are a few sparkles amidst the predictable. In the memoir category, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a quirky and commendable choice. Frederick Crews’ Follies of the Wise has a modicum of punk rock chic attached to it, as does Julie Phillips’ biography of James Tiptree, Jr.

But otherwise, it’s a pretty tepid list. Even stranger, the Critical Mass thread is now being heavily moderated, as those who take understandable umbrage over these choices (particularly over the lack of women awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing) are denied their say. Literary elite indeed.