Category / Awards

by Edward Champion

National Book Awards Finalists

Holy shit! Vollmann gets nominated, as does Christopher Sorrentino. We got us some surprises this year for that National Book Awards. Here’s the full list:

FICTION
E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House)
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon)
Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Renè Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow)
William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking)

NONFICTION
Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin)
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books)
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)

POETRY
John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco)
Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005
(Louisiana State University Press)
W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
Vern Rutsala, The Moment’s Equation (Ashland Poetry Press)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf)
Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam)
Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum)
Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest)
Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt)

by Edward Champion

I Am Knut!

[Translated from the Swedish by an anonymous reader. Culled from remarks given at a press conference this week.]

I am Knut Ahnlund and you’re not. I pity you for not being me. You don’t know what it’s like having to wade through books, turning every Nobel committee meeting into a fistfight. The Americans think that when someone spits in their face or slaps some puny little man like Dale Peck that it’s some sort of literary brawl, that it’s the subject of an important debate. But here in Sweden, we argue over literature and draw blood! Have you dislocated a shoulder because you cared that much about a book? I have. Several times. That’s integrity, dammit! And don’t even consider it an accident that I haven’t smiled for decades.

I am Knut! Witness the golden halo above my head and the tension in my stride. I haven’t paid for a breakfast in years and I eschew jellybeans and walks on the beach. I know pornography when I see it and I can tell you quite adamantly that Elfriede Jelinek is a shameless hussy. When these parvenus unleash the next Nobel laureate, you will know that I, Knut, will be there, maligning the disgraceful winner at every opportunity!

I am Knut! And I know what is grand for the human race. They may force me to return to my chair. They may tell me that this Nobel stuff is something I can’t get out of. But I’ll be the one biting without warning into your calf, ensuring that I draw the appropriate amount of blood with my bicuspids. Do not mess wth me or mock my name! For I control the hidden levers and still have considerable influence!

You will never find me disgracing the weekly book review pages. You will find me instead hunkered over an obscure book. I do not read these popular darlings. I do not even consider you part of my universe. For you are not Knut! Only I am! And if you would like to deify me, you know where to send the elegies and the checks.

by Edward Champion

National Book Awards Finalists

As a reader recently noted, there are now so many major awards being announced that it is often difficult to keep track. Tomorrow at 2:00 PM EST, this year’s National Book Award finalists will be announced. If we had to hazard a guess, we believe Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum will be one of the finalists. Of course, the truly distressing part of tomorrow’s nominations is that they will be announced by John Grisham. Which is a bit like inviting someone as crass and as obnoxious as Gilbert Gottfried to be the keynote speaker at an Evelyn Waugh conference.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Frances Dinkelspiel covers the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association.
  • This week, in the City, it’s Litquake. We’ll be crawling ourselves this Saturday, in more ways than one.
  • Word on the street is that the long-delayed Nobel Literature Prize will finally be announced this Thursday. Apparently, one of the Swedish intellectuals lost a few meatballs along the way. Knut Ahnlund gave notice that he was quitting in disgust over last year’s winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Ahnlund said that Jelinek’s work was “whinging, unenjoyable, violent pornography.” Well, that’s all very fine, Knut. But why wait a year to pull out? There’s still the risk of impregnating the proceedings with spurious seed. There’s been some speculation that Orhan Pamuk might be this year’s Nobel winner and that Ahnlund’s resignation has something to do with this year’s choice. But if my experience with self-important people serves as any guide, I’m guessing that Ahnlund wanted to sabotage this year’s proceedings by raising a stink and that the real winner will be someone completely unexpected. Let us hope that it’s as edgy a choice as Jelinek.
  • And speaking of awards, I’m not sure what to make of the Blooker. The Blooker hopes to award books that are based on blogs. But how many “blooks” are there? Certainly not enough to create a longlist. Further, are any of these really readable, much less enduring? More importantly, does Wil Wheaton really need another silly trinket?
  • Another day, another Dave E—- profile. His latest cause? Granting teachers more pay. While he’s at it, he may want to champion offering his volunteers some recompense. He’s also getting the little tykes to read every periodical in America, presumably to keep tabs on any naysayers. Child slave labor too? Why, in a parallel universe, Dave might very well be the literary equivalent of Phil Knight!
  • Four-Eyed Bitch wants to know why literary readings are so dull.
  • A new Internet radio station devoted to poetry has been launched by Brian Douthit.
  • Also worth looking into: Circadian Poems, a poetry blog.
  • Can pop culture be tracked in the 21st Century in book form? Encyclopedia of Pop Culture authors Michael and Jane Stern (among others) say no.
  • Literary critic Wayne C. Booth, author of The Rhetoric of Fiction, has passed on.

[UPDATE: The Complete Review has the full story on Knut “I Like My Literature Non-Pornographic” Ahnlund. Apparently, he’s not even a bona-fide Nobel judge and, whether he likes it or not, Ol’ Knut Basket Case won’t get his much vaunted reprieve until he meets his maker.]