NBCC Finalists, Newbery and Caldecott Awards, and More

It's a busy Monday in the book world, and we're here to cover it all.

The National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists on Saturday. You can read the full list here, but the fiction and non fiction finalists are as follows:

Fiction

• 2666, by Roberto Bolano
• Home, by Marilynne Robinson
• The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon
• The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, by M. Glenn Taylor
• Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

Non-fiction

• The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
• The Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust
• The Dark Side, by Jane Meyer
• White Protestant Nation, by Allan Lichtman
• From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776, by George C. Herring

The real surprises here, obviously, are the university press titles, by Taylor in fiction and Herring in non-fiction. Trenchmouth is about "the oldest living man in West Viriginia," the titular Taggart, so named for a lifelong oral affliction. Sounds interesting. If I had to predict the winners, I would go with The Lazarus Project in fiction (just a hunch), and The Republic of Suffering in non-fiction. I don't have a reason for picking either, other than a vague hunch, so don't go running to the Flamingo with this (Does the Flamingo still exist?).

In other awards news, the Newbery and Caldecott winners were announced this morning. The Newberry went to Neil Gaiman for his book The Graveyard Book. The Newbery is awarded for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." You can keep up with Gaiman by following his Twitter feed (@neilhimself), where his reaction has been, well, kind of awesome.

The Caldecott went to a book of poetry, The House in the Night, illustrated by Beth Krommes, written by Susan Marie Swanson.

Local writers were well represented in the ALA's two awards, as Kadir Nelson won the Koretta Scott King Award for We Are the Ship, and Marla Frazee was a Caldecott Honor for A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever. Congratulations to them for their acheivements. Both are books that deserve to be recognized.

It wasn't all wine and roses in the publishing world today, though, as Publishers Weekly parent company Reed Business laid off PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. Read David Ulin's reaction here.

And since it comes from a memoir, we must pass along Joe Torre's confirmation of what we all knew already: Alex Rodriguez is really weird and is obsessed with Derek Jeter. Good times.

Reading for the Weekend

To go with your hot toddy, a few interesting articles and items of note.

• This was pointed out earlier today on Twitter by @sarahw, but take a look at the New York Times Paperback Bestsellers list. The number one book is a fifty year-old novel (and a good one, at that).
  

• I'm not sure how everyone felt about Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, but the text is here. It will be available at Vroman's, via the excellent Graywolf Press, on February 3.

• Tomorrow night at 7 p.m., the National Book Critics Circle will announce the finalists for its annual awards. They'll be live-blogging the event. I'll be guessing the winners in various categories again. I did okay last year. Or rather, I got the fiction one right.

• And finally, if ever there was a book cover that made me want to read a book, this is it (via You'll Eat it and You'll Like it):

It's Thursday Afternoon

And that can mean only one thing...links!

• Via the Book People blog (one of the great indie stores in the world), comes the story of Lauren Myracle's book ttyl, which has been removed from the Round Rock, TX middle school library for being "vulgar." You know what I've just noticed, it's always the mothers who lead the charge to ban books, never the fathers. Why is that? Are the fathers just not as involved?

• n+1 on Bolano and the American practice of canonizing one foreign writer each decade (W.G. Sebald in the 90s, Bolano in the 00s).

• Finally the backlash against the stainless-steel-sub-zero-fridge-granite-counter-tops-fancy-tile-kitchen has begun. It is led by French Country Kitchens, and the NY Times takes note.

• Galleycat has excellent coverage of the National Book Awards, including video interviews with poetry winner Mark Doty and non-fiction winner Annette Gordon-Reed.

How Dorky Am I?

I am at home obsessively refreshing my twitter feed as sarahw live-tweets from the National Book Award presentation ceremony. So far, the winners are:

Young People's Fiction: Judy Bundell
Poetry: Mark Doty
Non-Fiction: Annette Gordon Reed (and it's her birthday today!)

And I just found out that Peter Metthiessen has won the fiction prize for the revised version of three books he wrote and published years ago. Expect the blogosphere to explode tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I need to get a life.

Mid-Week Crisis: The Links

After the internet took the day off yesterday, it is back and full of good stuff today:

• Vroman's favorite David Benioff has a new pilot at HBO. It is an adaptation of the George R.R. Martin fantasy series Song of Ice and Fire.

• Vying for the title of hottest book this season, Malcom Gladwell's Outliers gets Boinged.
  

• The non-profit small press Dzanc Books is hosting an online write-a-thon this Saturday to raise funds. Consider supporting your favorite writer.

• A tiny bit of controversy at the National Book Awards: Can Peter Matthiessen win the award for a (3) book(s) he already published (sort of) years ago?
  

Back tomorrow with actual commentary, if I can muster the strength.

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.

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.

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?

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.
  

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.

Some Awards, Some Video Entertainment, and My Youth: Just Wednesday's Links'

There's a lot happening in the world of literature today, and you've got a right to hear about all of it.

• The National Book Foundation has announced its 5 Under 35 Fiction selections for 2008. The winners are Nam Le, Sana Krasikov, Keith Gessen, Fiona Maazel, and Matthew Eck. I've had drunken conversations with both Le and Krasikov, and I had a sober conversation with Gessen when he was here for his event in April. Congratulations to all of them.

• I found this video of David Henry Sterry explaining how to get an agent pretty funny (courtesy of Galleycat): David Henry Sterry will be leading an event similar to this one ("The Art of the Memoir") at Vroman's on Friday, October 3. Panelists will include the very funny Chelsea Handler, author of Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea.

• It's National Punctuation Day. Celebrate accordingly. I like to use dashes myself. How about you?
  

• For some reason, I find myself thinking about Buster Olney's Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty today. Hmm, why could that be?

• A New York Times Magazine profile of Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, where Dylan Thomas, Saul Bellow, Milton Friedman, and I all used to drink (though, admittedly, not together).
  

Bring the Links, They All Screamed!

In honor of Tuesday, the greatest day ever:

• Banned Books Week is next week. Get your burning bookmark. (via Boing Boing)

• The McArthur Foundation Genius grants have been awarded. Bookish types Alex Ross and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie each received one of the $500,000 fellowships. And hats off to the MacArthur Foundation for honoring urban farmer Will Allen for "transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations."
  

• Alan Moore won't be watching the film version of Watchmen when it comes out. "It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."

Vroman's Podcast 5: Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga is the author of The White Tiger, a gripping new novel about contemporary India. It has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, one of two debut novels to make the list this year. I've already made it clear that I'm pulling for him.

Mr. Adiga and I spoke over the phone a short while ago. He was in his apartment in Mumbai, and I was in my kitchen. It was early in the morning for me, which might explain why I inverted the name of a key character in the book. During our conversation, which runs about 21 minutes, we spoke about globalization, outsourcing, book sales, and how the United States is already dead to the rest of the world. You know, the usual stuff.

Click here to download the podcast to your computer.

Booker Shortlist Announced

The six finalists for the Man Booker Prize for fiction have been announced. They are:

• The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
• The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry
• Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs, by Linda Grant
• The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher
• A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz

Obviously, there were a couple of surprises, namely the omission of The Enchantress of Florence and Netherland. I'm happy I have a horse in this race, as I'm pulling for Aravind Adiga's dazzling, wildly entertaining The White Tiger. Thoughts on the shortlist, anyone?

Vroman's is Best in Pasadena

Vroman's has been named Best Bookstore in Pasadena by the US Local Business Association. It's a great honor to win an award from an organization dedicated to promoting local businesses. From their press release:

The USLBA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USLBA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Thanks for the recognition, and thanks to our many wonderful customers, of course.

Rushdie is Best of the Bookers

It's been reported elsewhere, but Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has been named the greatest book of all friggin time, er Best of the Bookers. When Rushdie read at Vroman's, someone asked him to comment on winning the Booker for Midnight's Children. He quoted Kingsley Amis, who, upon winning the award late in his career for his (in my opinion) superb The Old Devils, commented "I've always hated this award, but I've just changed my mind."

No Shortlist Required

Jhumpa Lahiri has won the world's richest short story prize, the Frank O'Connor award for about $55,000, for her collection of stories Unaccustomed Earth. Apparently, she so lapped the competition that the judges dispensed entirely with the formality of a shortlist. Which really sucks for the books that would've gotten the recognition of being shortlisted.