And the National Book Award Finalists Are...

These ones.

Luci Tapahonso - the Navajo Nation's First Poet Laureate

Indian Country Today sings her praises.

From the article...

On April 24, Elmer Guy, president of Navajo Technical College, announced the appointment of Luci Tapahonso as the Navajo Nation’s first Poet Laureate. Tapahonso will officially assume her role for the two-year position at the college’s commencement ceremonies on May 17, Guy said in revealing the award.

The goal of designating a chief poet is “to encourage other Navajo poets, writers, film makers and artists to realize how important their work is to the continuance and growth of Navajo contemporary culture,” Guy said at a press conference announcing Tapahonso’s honor. “Luci represents the best of what it is to be Diné, honoring our traditions, while at the same time forming a contemporary voice that speaks beautifully to all people.”

Was the National Book Award in 1962 Rigged?

That's the question posed by Slate.

From the piece...

I talked to some of the players in that surprising decision, hoping to find out how The Moviegoer was crowned and whether it is true, as alleged, the novel won thanks only to shady backroom politicking. Percy’s victory set off a controversy that involved the most powerful man in publishing, a famous journalist eager to take credit for the award, and a cub reporter who would go on to become one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

Catch-22 was considered the favorite, and yet Percy’s greatest opposition, ironically, came not from Heller or any of the other nominees but his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. When the charismatic, mercurial founder of the house that bears his name learned it was Percy the judged had tabbed, he exclaimed, “They’re running the prize into the ground!” Knopf, who had been in the business since 1915, was known for his acuity and taste, for taking a chance on authors other publishers were loath to sign but later wished they had. He had failed, though, to recognize Percy’s talent, and had recently fired Stanley Kauffmann, the editor who acquired The Moviegoer and worked with Percy through four rewrites. In the days before the winner was announced Knopf endorsed another one of his books, The Château by William Maxwell, and knew it reflected poorly on him to be seen missing the mark so widely.

The Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone

One week after Mo Yan became the first Chinese author to win the Nobel prize, proud local officials rushed out a £70 million plan to transform his sleepy village into a "Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone".

From a story in the Telegraph...

Until last week, the county of Gaomi in the eastern province of Shandong was a poor farming community. It was here that Mr Mo ate tree bark and scrabbled for wild vegetables to survive a tough childhood. 

When reporters tracked down Mr Mo, 57, to his family home in the wake of his prize, they found his 90-year-old father working the farm, unperturbed by the hullaballoo.

But now, ambitious Communist party chiefs see a glorious future for the county as tourists flock to pay homage to the Nobel prize winner. 

On Tuesday, Fan Hui, a local official, paid a visit to Mr Mo's father to ask him to renovate the family home. 

"Your son is no longer your son, and the house is no longer your house," urged Mr Fan, according to the Beijing News, explaining that the author was now the pride of China. "It does not really matter if you agree or not," he added.

William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech

How Well Do You Know the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winners?

Find out by taking this quiz.

And, by the way, congrats to the winners (though, oddly, not to any fiction writers).

9 Most Controversial Pulitzer Prize Wins of All-Time

The list, care of Bachelors Degrees Online.

From said list...

2. Janet Cooke

Give Janet Cooke credit: she knew a Pulitzer Prize-worthy story when she saw one. Except, of course, she didn't see one; she fabricated one. In 1980, Cooke received a Pulitzer for her Washington Post article "Jimmy's World," the story of an 8-year-old heroin addict who had supposedly been hooked since age 5. Unfortunately for Cooke, the story was a little too good. The mayor of D.C. ordered a task force to search the city for the boy, who they obviously could not locate. As her story began to unravel, Cooke fessed up, resigned from the Post, and the Pulitzer was returned.

Celebrating the Oddest Book Titles of the Year

Enjoy!

Literary Bad Sex Awards Shortlisted

What are the worst sex scenes in literature in the past year? That's what the U.K.'s Literary Review wants to unzip.

From a piece in the Huffington Post...

Nominated authors for the 19th annual award, which celebrates the most embarrassing passage describing sex in a novel - not including porn or erotica - include luminaries such as Stephen King, Haruki Murakami and James Frey.

"In a year in which literary awards have come under fire for parochialism and dumbing-down, Literary Review is proud to uphold and recognise literary excellence from around the world," the Literary Review said. "Authors in the running hail from, among other nations, the USA, Hungary, Japan and Australia. Two are annually mentioned in the same breath as the Nobel Prize."

A couple of the entries...

"In the shower, Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap." (Ed King/Guterson)

"She was wearing jeans. The fabric whispered under my palm. She leaned back and her head bonked on the door. 'Ouch!' I said. 'Are you all right?'" (11.22.63/King)

Swedish Poet Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Congratulations, Tomas Transtromer.

Allegro


After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

Howard Jacobson: Award-Winning Author...Ping-Pong Player

London author Howard Jacobson recently won the Man Booker Award for his novel, The Finkler Question. He was interviewed recently, here, about the win.

Here's a question. Did you know he was once a ranked junior table tennis player in England? 'Tis true.

Tablet Magazine has a piece Jacobson wrote some time back, profiling ping-pong champ Marty Reisman.

From the piece...

The big question for those of us jaded with the modern game of ping-pong—the oof-plock, oof-plock of devious sponge, no rally lasting longer than the cramped spin serve, the dabbed return, and the silent kill—was whether the great Marty Reisman, just one grey hair short of 70 but still refusing the rest owing to old age, was far enough advanced on his comeback trail to lift another U.S. Open Hardbat title.

Hardbat? The antiquated three or five ply wooden paddle covered with rubber pimples. Elegant and audible. Kerplock-plock.

The smart money was saying no. “The guy’s driving me fucking nuts ringing me up every hour of the day telling me how well he’s playing,” Tim Boggan confided to me on the first morning of the Open in Fort Lauderdale. “But he’s living in a fool’s paradise. Sure, he’s practising, but against the same opponent. Steve Berger. Always Steve Berger. He isn’t tournament-hardened. My heart says yes. But he’s got no chance.” You listen to Tim Boggan. Himself one of the game’s old hardbat lions, he is American ping-pong’s most impassioned historian, a one-time English professor at Long Island University whose specialty was Romantic and Victorian poetry but whose true love was always table tennis; a grizzled, exasperated man with an icy beard, dreaming thwarted dreams, another mariner chasing the gleaming margins of the untraveled world. So you listen to what Tim Boggan’s heart says, as well.

But then whose heart doesn’t say yes to Marty? He is the fatal Odysseus you have to follow beyond the sunset. Succeed or fail, just one more voyage. Opinions differ as to whether Marty Reisman was America’s greatest ping-pong player ever, but he was certainly its boldest adventurer, lifting the prestigious British Open title when he was only 19, enlivening a doleful postwar European ping-pong community with Lower East Side effrontery, an extrovert belligerent with one of the loveliest and most lethal forehands you could hope to see, a natural who seemed to be inventing the game anew every time he played it. And now here he is, over half a century since he first became United States National Junior Champion, wanting another shot at another title. Of course the heart says yes.

James Beard Award Winners

Congratulations to all the cookbook and food writing winners.

Great Novel? You Must Be Having a Laugh

The U.K's Telegraph highlights the plight of the comedic novel. Plight, in that it often doesn't win many literary awards. But why? Just because they're funny doesn't mean they're not serious.

From the piece...

Comic novels — let’s call them terrific novels that happen to be funny — tend to fall through the cracks, especially where prizes are concerned. Publishers have to choose which books from their list to submit for a prize such as the Orange: is a book that makes a reader laugh really worthy of a prize? Or is it just, well, not serious enough? Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar, is really very funny: luckily he is already Ian McEwan, so no one will think less of him for that. He has always been what you might call a darkly funny writer but there is real slapstick in Solar; Roddy Doyle — a master of comedy himself, when he wants to be — told me that it reminded him of Tom Sharpe’s books, “only more subtle”.

But there is another issue, too: one for which you can’t blame publishers or booksellers. The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard. It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires knowing how hard to push and when to stop on a dime. The reason the classic comic novels — such as Lucky Jim, or Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, or Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, or Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle — stand the test of time is not because they are great comic novels: it’s because they are great novels, full stop. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: comic novel or serious novel? Doesn’t matter. Brilliant novel.

The Very Best in Bad Sex Writing

Who is going to win the coveted prize this year? Philip Roth? Paul Theroux? Nick Cave?

From the piece...

The Pulitzer prize-winning Roth makes the line-up for The Humbling, in which the ageing actor Simon converts Pegeen, a lesbian, to heterosexuality. The Literary Review singled out a scene in which Simon and Pegeen pick up a girl from a bar and convince her to take part in a threesome. Simon looks on as Pegeen uses her green dildo to great effect. "This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be," writes Roth. "There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze."

'Roth is very anxious about his description of sex," said Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review of the extract. "Why write of a scene that repeatedly features a green dildo, 'this was not soft porn', unless you're worried that it might be taken as such - in this case, with sentences like 'then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy's lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts...', the worry seems justified. But it's the overcompensation that qualifies this passage for the award – the totems and shamans are an attempt to convince us that Roth's leering is actually giving some vital anthropological insight."

Designer Bookbinders International Bookbinding Competition 2009

The awards have been announced and Book Patrol recaps.

The Best Bookshelves of 2007

Seriously. They're cool.

And what should you put on those seriously cool bookshelves? The National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors picks their favorite books (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) in 2007 and the New York Times has chosen their Ten Best this year.

Bad Sex Award Nominations

From the Guardian Unlimited:

"Now in its 15th year, the prize, which only targets literary fiction, aims "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." The winner, who will be announced on today at the In & Out Club in London, is awarded a semi-abstract statue representing sex in the 1950s and a bottle of champagne, if he or she turns up."

The Guardian Unlimited has excerpts from those shortlisted to win. Perhaps you should read them aloud with your special someone before turning in early tonight. Wink wink. Nudge nudge.

Update: The recently deceased Norman Mailer has won the coveted award.

National Book Award Round-Up

The winners were announced last night and a special congratulations to Sherman Alexie, fellow WSU graduate and fellow Seattle resident, on his much-deserved win for his new book. The Seattle Times has the local slant of his win in this morning's paper.

For more information about all the winners, go here.

And, did you want to win the National Book Award next year? Just follow these five easy steps.

Washington State Book Award Winners

If you're in the Seattle area, you might want to stop by the Seattle Public Library tomorrow night as they honor the winners of the 2007 Washington State Book Awards. Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant, pictured above, is one of the winners. It is a picture book written by Bainbridge Island author Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by New Yorker Carin Berger. Another winner, much deserving, is Charles D'Ambrosio, whose fiction The Dead Fish Museum is just outstanding. Six of the stories in the collection first appeared in The New Yorker. Perhaps I'll be nominated for a Washington State Book Award in the future. Surprisingly, I didn't get nominated for Odd Harbor.