The Haunting of Vroman's Bookstore

When you've been around for over 110 years, you're bound to accumulate your fare share of myths and ghost stories, and Vroman's is no different. My coworker Anne has heard from a local psychic that Vroman's may be haunted by the ghost of our founder, A.C. Vroman. Anne, however, is unconvinced: "Since ghosts haunt places, I find that highly unlikely, because Vroman's current site is several miles from the business Mr. Vroman originally established. Still, if we can't have a store cat, a store ghost is a nice alternative."

I've never seen anything out of the ordinary, so I can say for certain that the promotions department office is not haunted. If you're looking for some more verifiable ghosts, I humbly point you towards this list of haunted libraries. That library in Glendale does give me the heebie-jeebies. Happy Halloween, everybody!

Ticket Giveaway! Marcus Buckingham at Azusa Pacific

Courtesy of our friends at Off the Page with Melinda Lee on KNX 1070 News Radio, we've got a handful of tickets to give away to the upcoming November 7 appearance of Marcus Buckingham at Azusa Pacific University.

The Cambridge-educated Buckingham has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal and is routinely lauded by such corporations as Toyota, Coca-Cola, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, Yahoo and Disney as an invaluable resource in informing, challenging, mentoring and inspiring people to find their strengths and obtain and sustain long-lasting personal success.

A wonderful resource for leaders, managers, and educators, Buckingham challenges conventional wisdom and shows the link between engaged employees and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, and the rate of turnover. Buckingham graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 with a master's degree in Social and Political Science.

If you'd like a pair of tickets (valued at $40 a piece) to meet Marcus Buckingham on Friday, November 7, email me at pbrown@vromansbookstore.com. If you win, I'll email you back. Pretty simple, right?

Man, We Need to Get Some Sun

This photo was taken last week, when George Hamilton had his event at the store. For those of you who weren't there, you missed an epic evening with the Tanned One. He told stories for about an hour, then signed copies of his new memoir Don't Mind If I Do.

A typical George Hamilton story begins like this: "There I am in the Persian desert with the Princess of Iran, of course, and we spy a solitary rider approaching over a dune in the distance. He's atop a beautiful Arabian stallion, with a rich red saddle blanket and silver saddle. As he approaches, we realize that it's Cary Grant, stoned out of his mind on LSD..."

Spend Halloween with Ray Bradbury

This morning when I checked my Google Reader page, I discovered this post on the Guardian Book Blog about Halloween-related fiction:

There's horror in Bradbury's stories - why else would I be recommending him for Halloween? - but it's not the horror of blood and gore. It's the horror of ringing telephones, the horror of the realisation that something inside you - a growing baby, perhaps, or a collection of bones - is alien and disturbing, the horror of a world where simply walking aimlessly through the dark night is something suspicious and possibly illegal.

The title of that post was "Spend Halloween with Ray Bradbury," which you can literally do at Vroman's Bookstore. Mr. Bradbury will be here tomorrow at noon to sign hardcover copies of his books. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood.

Oprah and The Kindle

Unless you've been living under a rock or, I don't know, focusing on the election or something, you probably know that Oprah is just crazy about Amazon's ebook reader the Kindle. It is, in fact, her "new favorite thing in the world." This is bad news for bookstores, as Amazon uses a special ebook format on the Kindle, one that only they can sell. In the past, Oprah's book endorsements, in the form of her Oprah's Book Club picks, have been a boon to bookstores everywhere, raising the profile of the titles and making bestsellers of authors like Dr. Oz and Wally Lamb. Most recently, her endorsement of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle helped boost sales during an otherwise slow month. That could all change with her endorsement of the Kindle. What happens to bookstores if all of Oprah's fans start buying their books on the Kindle?

This might explain why the reaction amongst the bookselling community has been one of disappointment and, dare I say, betrayal. The reaction I've heard from several people has been "I thought she was on our side." My reaction has been a little bit different. I never thought Oprah was anything more than she is -- a corporate shill. Her famous "My Favorite Things" episodes, in which she bestows upon her audience a cornucopia of hot new products (the Kindle might just be one of them this year), are consumerist orgies dressed up as feel good stories, with the audience glowing with the same dazzled blood lust common to fascist rallies and Dashboard Confessional concerts. Some of the products are obscure - a special kind of soap, for instance - but often they're cashmere sweaters, gadgets, and other products you can buy at the mall. I'm sure for the local sweetshop that makes artisinal chocolates, her endorsement is a huge blessing, but more often, that blessing goes to Apple or Sony or OfficeMax. It's big business, and it has the hint of legal payola.

Look, Oprah has done more good than bad for the book business, but let's not kid ourselves and pretend that she's "on our side." Is it a shock that she doesn't seem to value bookstores? When do you think she last visited one?

Our store president, Allison Hill, had some thoughts on the issue, as well, and phrased them as a plea rather than a harangue (What can I say, she takes the high road):

"Oprah, if you’re reading this, forget about cashmere pashimas, spa-like shampoo, and new technology this holiday season, remind your fans what’s really important:

A sense of community. Time honored traditions. Human contact. A neighborhood gathering place. Keeping money in the community. Passionate, personal book recommendations. Putting the right book in the right person’s hands to help change their life. The smell and feel of books. A destination where ideas and information and people’s stories are valued and honored.

Your endorsement of a “gadget” has a ripple effect far greater than you may realize. Book lovers buying Kindles and digital content exclusively through Amazon means the further erosion of our sales, and a precarious future for many independent bookstores.

Independent bookstores are protectors of freedom of speech, financial support for local charities, generators of tax dollars for communities, resources for entertainment and education, and insurance against the chainification of Main Street America. These contributions should not be taken for granted, and certainly not put in jeopardy.

When you endorse this new “gadget”, what are you really endorsing? and is it worth it?"

That's One Off the List

Longtime readers of this blog may remember my list of books I hope the next president has read. First on that list were a pair of books by Michael Pollan about food production and consumption in the United States. If the current poll trends hold, it looks like I may get my wish. Barack Obama has already read Pollan's excellent piece from a recent NY Times Magazine on the role oil plays in our nation's agriculture.

Back in Beige

I'm back from my three-day soujourn to the Governor's Conference on Women, where I helped host author signings with the likes of Rachel Ray, Rocco DiSpirito, Jenny McCarthy, and Madeleine Albright. I'm very, very tired, so you'll forgive me if this post is brief. A few things to check out while I soak in a hot tub:

• Narrative Magazine has a new short story by Stuart Dybek available online (You have to sign up to read it, but it is free).

• The Times' Paper Cut blog has a playlist by Todd Hasak-Lowy, who will be appearing at Vroman's on November 11 to discuss and sign his new book Captives.

• Everybody in the world has already linked to this, so I should too: Rolling Stone has a lengthy profile of the last days of David Foster Wallace.

• A few of us here at Vroman's are huge Mad Men fans (It's clearly Originality Day here at the bookstore), and awhile back we were talking about putting together a Mad Men display of books that seemed in a similar vein to the show. The first book that popped into my head was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, but the second was Revolutionary Road. Turns out I was right (via The Morning News).
  

Guest Post: Jennie Shortridge on Love and Marriage

Seattle author Jennie Shortridge will be at Vroman’s Sunday, October 19 at 5 p.m. to read from and discuss her latest novel, Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe, quickly becoming a book club favorite. Called “smart, funny, and wise,” by author Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain) it’s the story of middle-aged Mira’s journey from perfect to better when she flees her “perfect” life and lands in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, known as “The Center of the Universe,” to begin life anew.

Jennie writes about the biology of love and marriage here:
___________________________________________

Little did I know when I wrote Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe that by re-imagining the age-old story of the runaway wife, I might tap the zeitgeist of that elusive fifty percent: the American married. And not just the female contingent. As I write this, nearly half of the customer reviews for the book on Amazon are from men.

For the past few months promoting this book, I’ve talked to hundreds of readers at book stores and events, phoned in to book club meetings across the country, and participated in numerous blog events out in cyberspace. Through all of that, I’ve been fascinated to discover that we’re all asking the same questions about the state of long-term marriage and the lack of passion that can plague it—or worse, sound the alarm or death knell of something we once thought sacred and forever.

The following Q&A is presented with these caveats: I am no expert in marriage or psychology, and I hold no degrees nor am I a licensed anything. However, my husband and I have been together for nineteen years. I have been both the dumper and the dumpee in relationships. I read voraciously about the biology of love, the science of romance and dating and mating. And like Paul Simon says in a song of the same title, “Maybe I think too much.”

An imaginary conversation, then, performed in both parts by me:

JS1: Where does all the romance go after we’ve been married a while, and will it ever come back?

JS2: In the book, Mira is a science teacher and considers love from a biological standpoint as a way of coping. For we lay people, understanding the biological underpinnings of human love and romance can help us gain clarity and achieve a better comfort level around the inevitable changes in marriage.

When first we fall in love, chemicals flow through our brains that make us feel euphoric, aroused, and attractive, and like the only one on earth who has ever felt this way with another person. It’s the same chemical that drives addiction. It’s the same chemical that is released when we eat chocolate. Why? So we will fulfill our biological imperative and mate with another human. That’s it. From the body’s perspective, it’s not about finding our soul mate, but about replacing ourselves on earth so our species will survive.

Once we have fulfilled that obligation, or enough time has passed to do that—say a year to a year-and-a-half—the passion chemical is replaced by a bonding chemical that encourages us to stay together long enough to raise the offspring to physical viability—say seven years old (the dreaded seven-year itch). And yes, it applies even if we don’t have children.

At that point, the partnership is no longer required, biologically speaking, and things can get dicey. That’s when we must become our most human selves and not act and react from an unthinking and solely biological place. That’s when it gets more difficult to be romantic and kind with our partners, but we have to if we want to build life-long love and respect (and fingers crossed, passion) inside our relationships.

JS1: How do you get the old zip-zang-doodle back in a marriage?

JS2: There’s a reason why they say marriage takes work. It’s not the bills or the kids or the countless other obligations that are the hard work. It’s staying passionate and in love and respectful through all of those things that is the challenge. That’s what happens to Mira and her husband Parker. They forget to keep talking; they retreat within themselves. They forget how to be in love.

Personally, I think it’s the small kindnesses, and the reciprocation of them, that help two people stay in love. Or if they’ve disappeared of late, the reintroduction of them that can bring excitement and connection back. The “I love yous” and kisses hello and goodbye, the shoulder rubbing after a hard day, the time we take away from everything else to just talk to our partners and try to really understand what’s going with them. And by staying true to ourselves as well, so we stay interesting and vibrant and, well, desirable.

JS1: Is it wrong to fantasize about running away? Okay, about doing the horizontal tango with someone who is not necessarily your spouse?

JS2: I hope not. I figure that anything happening between your own two ears is your business. I’ve talked with a lot of women now about this topic, and trust me when I say you’re not the only one going to see “Iron Man” ten times not for the action but to moon over Robert Downey Jr’s dreamy eyes. They’re so dark and deep and… Ahem. Excuse me. I have some, um, thinking to do.

All My Friends Were Vampires

Anybody else noticed that vampires are suddenly everywhere? It's like the early 90s all over again. These things are always cyclical. On with the links:

• Via Kottke.org comes the thrilling news that Brad Pitt will star in the film adaptation of Moneyball.
  

• Kottke.org was full of great finds this morning, including this interesting list of books that inspired graphic designers (no design books allowed). Among them: Play It As It Lays, Infinite Jest, and Hunger.

• "In reality, The White Tiger reads like the first draft of a Bollywood screenplay (no romance or songs sadly). Every character is a cliché: the scheming servant, the corrupt politician, the alluring master's wife. The humour is bitter and unsubtle; the writing forgettable." Let's see...with no romance and no songs, I don't think you have a Bollywood screenplay (also, the hero doesn't find his mother - who he long assumed to be dead - blind and begging in a Caclutta market); the scheming servant would be the main character, a richly-drawn, multifaceted person who acts in all kinds of unpredictable ways; the corrupt politician is seen only briefly and serves as a plot point and little else; and the master's wife didn't seem alluring in the least to me. I will say that the humor is bitter (and abundant), but that would be, um, the point, I think. I disagree with Mr. Rahim -- buy The White Tiger. In fact, buy it here.

• See, I'm not a loser, I'm a late bloomer.

National Book Award Finalists Announced

As promised, today the National Book Award finalists were announced. There were a few surprises, in my opinion, including the inclusion of Salvatore Scibona for his novel The End (a coup for the wonderful Graywolf Press) and the omission of Nam Le, who I thought was the one shoe-in for the list. Below are the complete lists of finalists in Fiction (I've read a fat lot of none of these books. I am an ignoramus):

Fiction

• The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon
• Telex from Cuba, by Rachel Kushner
• Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen
• Home, by Marilynne Robinson
• The End, by Salvatore Scibona

Click the link above for a complete list of nominees in Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young Adult Literature.

The White Tiger Wins the Booker!

Aravind Adiga's debut novel has won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. You may remember I interviewed Mr. Adiga a couple of weeks ago for our podcast. Congratulations to him on his tremendous novel.

What Should Be the Official State Novel of California?

The House of Representatives of Massachusetts recently named Moby-Dick the commonwealth's official 'epic novel,' a compromised reached after representatives from areas that were home to writers Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne protested. While the bill must still pass the Senate and get the governor's signature, it got me thinking about our own state's literary tradition.

California doesn't have an official state book or novel, although we do have a state folk dance (It's the Hustle. Just kidding, it's actually square dancing). Obviously there's a very rich history of literature from the Golden State, but how would one choose the "capital O" Official State Novel. Let's try, shall we?

Let's limit it to novels, since throwing in non-fiction and poetry would complicate things horribly. I won't try to separate out the epic novels from the regular, non-epic ones, although I'd be interested to hear exactly how that distinction was made in the Massachusetts State House. Let's further say that the State of California should be the primary setting for the novel, though not the only setting, and that the author should be in some way associated with California. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about California, but I don't tend to think of him as a "Californian author." With these guidelines in place, a few contenders jump to the fore immediately. John Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, should certainly be given consideration. Likely something from Jack London would make the shortlist as well (they did name a square after him in Oakland, after all). Below are my picks for the long shortlist:

• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammet
• The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
• The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West
• Ham on Rye, by Charles Bukowski
• Ask the Dust, by John Fante
• Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
• The Human Comedy, by William Saroyan
• Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion
• East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
  
• The Valley of the Moon, by Jack London
• Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis
• LA Confidential, by James Ellroy
  

Looking at that list, three things jump out at me. One is that certain books, like Didion's Play It As It Lays, Bukowski's Ham on Rye, and Ellis's Less Than Zero would never, ever be chosen as official state novels due to their subject matter. I'm sure somebody out there would object to just about every book on the list, but those three would be the first to go. The other thing I notice is, where are the Latino novels? How can we have a serious discussion about California's literature without a single Latino author on the list? We can't. Something must be done about it, but I will confess that I'm not likely to be the one to do it. I've read many great books by Latino authors, but none of them are Californian, strangely enough. Others write predominantly non-fiction (I'm thinking specifically of Victor Villasenor, who is quintessentially Californian). It looks like I've got some homework to do. If you have suggestions for a great work of fiction about California by a Latino author, please mention it in the comments, and I will add it to the list.

The third thing that occurs to me when I look at the list is how impossible it would be to pick one book from it. There are so many great books about so many different aspects of California. The state is too diverse to be captured in a single work. It may be a cop-out, but that's how I feel about it. If I were pressed, I would choose East of Eden, a big, sprawling, multi-generational novel with biblical themes. Is it big and sprawling enough to encompass a state like California? Not even close.

Help a Girl Out, Will Ya?

I don't normally do this. I almost never outright request that you, fair reader, buy a specific book at a specific time, but this is a special case. I've mentioned Amanda Petrusich a few times on this blog. She is the author of the new book It Still Moves, a great book about Americana music. In it, she traces the history of Americana music from its roots in the delta blues and Appalachian folk music to its present day incarnations in Nashville country and the freak folk scene. It's a good book, a fast read, and one of its best attributes is Petrusich's unique and endearing voice. As she makes her way around the country, she stops at truck stops, eats at Cracker Barrel, and muses on coal mines, Oxycontin, and kitsch.

Yesterday on her blog Player Piano Music, a quirky blog where she writes about her life and her career, Petrusich posted the troubling news that she was robbed on a recent research trip to the South. The thieves took her jewelry as well as:

"my watch, my new laptop, my flash drive (containing a year's worth of writing, including a 3000 word feature story that's due on Tuesday morning and, ugh, the eulogy I wrote for my grandmother in February), my notebook and notes, a few books, my tape recorder, three days' worth of interview tapes, and a bunch of other stuff..."

Obviously, the monetary value of all that "stuff" really adds up, but what seems most depressing to me is the loss of her writing and her research.

So I'm doing something simple here, and requesting that you buy a copy of Petrusich's book today (you can do so by clicking here or by clicking on the title earlier in the post or on the cover of the book...I've made it easy for you). It's not charity, as you're getting something back (something that I think is well worth the money), but it might help restore some karma in the world. It won't bring back any of that lost stuff, but it will, eventually, put a little money in Ms. Petrusich's pocket. If reading about good music isn't your thing, if you think, like some, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then buy it for a friend. It makes a great gift.

Prize Week Mania Grips Vroman's!

This week marks one of the busiest weeks of the literary schedule as the winner of the Booker Prize and the nominees for the National Book Award are announced. As I've said before, I'm pulling for Aravind Adiga's excellent The White Tiger to win the Booker, while I'm hoping to see a few familiar names on the National Book Award list (Benioff? Le?). Not everyone is as eagerly awaiting the announcements as I,though. Lee Rourke, for one, isn't too excited about any of this year's Booker Shortlisters.

Hipsters Rejoice!

Pitchfork Media, the home for all things obscure music criticism related, will publish its first music guide this fall. On November 11, Fireside Books will publish The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. While there are other books that cover the same timeframe (particularly the very odd and funny This Is Uncool), none has Pitchfork's signature blend of snark and authority behind it:

From art-rock and proto-punk godfathers such as Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie to today's leading lights such as the Arcade Fire, the White Stripes, and Kanye West; from superstars to cult heroes; and from punk, indie, and pop to hip-hop, electronic music, and metal, we've created the ultimate playlist. Interspersed throughout are sidebars on the most vital subgenres from electro to grime to riot grrrl, along with pieces like "Career Killers: The Songs That Ended It All" and "Runaway Trainwrecks: The Post-Grunge Nadir."

I, for one, can't wait.

The Global Weirdness Initiative

The best thing about the internet, I've always felt, is the sheer quantity of incredibly weird stuff on it. For instance, I was just checking out the Barrelhouse Blog, as I am wont to do from time to time, when I came across this post about a guy (it has to be a guy, right?) who posted an ad on Craigslist looking for a professional writer to write the "about me" section of his personal ad on a dating site. That's good stuff, right? What I'm wondering today is this: before Al Gore invented the internet, what happened to stuff like this? Did it just evaporate? What were the old outlets for weirdness?

And since this is a book blog, I have to ask: at what point does the economy get so bad that somebody with a book published by Knopf read that ad and think, "I hope no one else has seen this one yet."

And the Nobel Goes To...

French novelist and essayist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Shock of shocks: I haven't read him. As Jacket Copy has pointed out this morning, neither have most Americans, as his books can be difficult to find here in the states. A quick check of our inventory shows that we've carried three of his books fairly recently: Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, Onitsha, and Wandering Star. I'm assuming at least one of these will find its way back to our shelves.

Of all the reaction on the Internet, I found this piece by John Sutherland on the Guardian blog particularly interesting:

The larger question raised by this year's award one can confidently have an opinion about. Has America got too big for its cultural boots? So big, in fact, that it's positively dangerous. Our screens, large and small, have been Americanised. Our popular music. Our bestseller lists increasingly feature American, not home-grown blockbusters. Even the credit crunch, which is shaking up our lives, comes to us courtesy of Wall Street, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes.

He goes on to hope for a Nobel for John Le Carre, something I wholeheartedly endorse, but find somewhat unlikely. As for my guess of Salman Rushdie, well, who knows?

Sarah Vowell on New York City

Sarah Vowell was on The Daily Show recently and she wasn't too happy with the way some politicians praise New York City on September 11, and then use New York City as the paragon of all that's evil and elitist about America when they're on the stump in middle America:



Did I mention that Vroman's will be hosting Sarah Vowell at All Saints Church on Thursday, October 16 at 7 p.m. That's next Thursday! Did I mention that? Well, I did now. (Thanks to Jezebel for first posting this video.)

Appearing Elsewhere

The Pasadena Playhouse District - the area of Pasadena where Vroman's is located - has an excellent blog called Pasadena: Center of the Universe. Today, they've posted an interview with me. You can read my (definitely wrong) guess at who will win the Nobel Prize this year, among other things.

Of course, now that I've thrown my two cents in, everybody's guessing the Nobel winner.

Links of Note for Tuesday

It's a glorious morning in Southern California, and as such, the links:

• Laurel Maury reviews the much discussed Jewel of Medina in the LA Times. "The Jewel of Medina" is a second-rate bodice ripper or, rather, a second-rate bodice ripper-style romance (it doesn't really have sex scenes). It's readable enough, but it suffers from large swaths of purple prose. Paragraphs read like ad copy for a Rudolph Valentino movie. Also of note regarding the much-discussed Jewel ... was this piece in the Guardian regarding how a bookstore should decide whether to carry a controversial book or not. The key question: Will anyone buy it?

• This NY Times article about Idlewild Books, a NYC bookshop that shelves travel guides next to the national literature of that country, reminded me of something Lawrence Weschler once said at a reading of his. He wished that bookstores would shelve all of his books together in a section called "Literature" rather than scattering them about in Art, Biography, Science, etc. It's an interesting idea, but one that, from a booksellers point of view, could quickly become a nightmare.

• Note to authors heading to Kenya for their book tours (which, let's face it, is pretty much everybody, right?): get your papers in order.

• To prepare for Thursday's Nobel Prize announcement -- the complete list of laureates in literature.
  

Vroman's Podcast 6: Otis Chandler

For the latest edition of Vroman's Podcast, we're trying something different. Our guest this week isn't an author, but he is among the more important people in the book business today. Otis Chandler is the founder of Goodreads.com, a social networking site for readers. I have a Goodreads account, as do many of my friends. Vroman's has its own group (Big ups to the Vroman's Goodreads group!), and the site continues to evolve, playing host to over 650,000 users, some of whom are both authors and readers.

In this interview, which runs about 26 minutes long, Otis and I talk about the history of Goodreads, the future of social networking sites, and of course, what he's reading right now. In the process, I learned a bit about web design, and I said "I'm curious" about forty times (Seriously. There should be a drinking game or something.).

To download the podcast, click here.

Nobel Noise and Sales

Slate joins the American backlash against Horace Engdahl, the Nobel Prize juror who called American literature "too isolated, too insular." Adam Kirsch argues that, well, Engdahl is wrong, and furthermore, he's merely continuing a long run of the Nobel committee dissing America:

Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has chosen to honor. Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common man. Their most famous books, The Good Earth and The Grapes of Wrath, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Prize, in 1930, wrote broad satires on American provincialism with nothing formally adventurous about them.

Such writers reflected back to Europe just the image of America they wanted to see: earnest, crude, anti-intellectual. There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.

While griping about not winning awards seems a bit ridiculous given American cultural hegemony, it's tough to argue with Kirsch's argument. Especially when he goes on to talk about the obscurity and (some would argue) mediocrity of recent European winners.

This got me thinking about literary awards and their impact (or lack thereof) on book sales. A while ago, Max at The Millions noted that the Nobel Prize is the only literary award to impact sales in any noticeable way, as customers would come into the bookstore the day it was announced looking for books by the winner. That doesn't happen with the National Book Award or the Booker. Of course, as we know of all statistics, they don't tell the whole story. As Galleycat points out:

"It seems, at first glance, that the only impact of the Nobel on American book publishing is a possible uptick for the non-American writers who win it; when you look at the Americans who've received the medal, from Sinclair Lewis in 1930 to Toni Morrison in 1993, our general impression is that they tended to already sell strongly by the time Sweden recognized their greatness."

Of course the sales went up, it was the first time most Americans had heard of recent Nobel winners like Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo. (It's telling that right now at the Millions, they're trying to guess the nominees of the National Book Award. Guessing the next Nobel winner would be considerably harder.) The Nobel had done something that the American and British awards tend not to do, bring a new writer to our attention. Should we be reading more world literature? Yes. At the same time, one could argue that, to an extent, the diversity to be found in American literature makes up for this. American literature, in its own weird way, is world litearture. It encompasses dozens of cultures - all of them American - and ranges across styles and genres. Junot Diaz, Marilynne Robinson, Colson Whitehead, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Lorrie Moore, Sam Lipsyte, Dave Eggers, Aimee Bender, Chuck Pahlanuik, Jonathan Franzen, Kate Christensen, George Saunders, Joan Didion, and Tom Drury are all American authors. They offer an incredibly diverse picture of the world, whether the Nobel committee ever recognizes it or not.

Not Very Creative Title About Links Goes Here

A few things to tide you over until tonight's great debate:

• Normally I dig these weird home decor ideas involving books but this inverted bookshelf is kinda stupid. It looks like it would be hard to get the books, out and that it would only look cool from one angle.
  

• A member of the Nobel Prize jury has said that American literature sucks (well, sort of). Normally this kind of America dissing would have Sarah Palin in an uproar but since it has to do with books, I'm guessing it won't come up tonight. Instead, we'll have to settle for the polite outrage of the blogosphere.

• The Miracle Worker, by the other William Gibson.

• 50 things every comic collection requires. (via kottke.org)

• While others are posting about the highest paid authors, I'm more interested in this Slate piece about how bloggers are paid.

Hayden Carruth, Poet, Has Died

Hayden Carruth, winner of the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the 1996 National Book Award for Poetry, has passed away at his home in Munnsville, NY at the age of 87. Regular readers of this blog may remember that back in April, I closed my month of poetry with Carruth's poem "The Last Poem in the World":

Would I write it if I could?
Bet your glitzy ass I would.

Carruth lived in a small, rural town not far from where I grew up in Upstate New York. His look was classic as his poetry -- at once tender, wizened, and sage. He was a favorite of my mother, Kam, who I have to thank for sharing the sad news with me.

The Legacy of The Satanic Verses

"What we are talking about here is not a system of formal censorship, under which the state bans works deemed offensive. Rather, what has developed is a culture of self-censorship in which the giving of offence has come to be seen as morally unacceptable. In the 20 years since the publication of The Satanic Verses the fatwa has effectively become internalised...

"In a plural society it is both inevitable and important that people offend others. Inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable. And we should deal with those clashes in the open rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social progress requires one to offend some deeply held sensibilities. "If liberty means anything," as George Orwell once put it, "it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." If we want the pleasures of pluralism, we have to put up with the pain of being offended."

Kenan Malik in The Guardian. Bravo.