The winners of the National Book Awards have been announced. Unsurprisingly, the non-fiction award went to Joan Didion’s universally acclaimed The Year of Magical Thinking. In fiction, the winner was William T. Vollman for Europe Central. I bet Ed is happy with the choice.
As has been widely reported, the Whitbread Prize shortlist has been announced. The finalists are Nick Hornby, for A Long Way Down; Salman Rushdie for Shalimar the Clown; Ali Smith for The Accidental; and Christopher Wilson for The Ballad of Lee Cotton.
The Guardian seems shocked that Salman Rushdie made the cut. I suppose it’s become fashionable to knock him, but I really enjoyed Shalimar the Clown. With the exception of one or two missteps towards the end, I thought it was a far better book than much of what I’ve read this year.
By the way, the Whitbread also has a first novel category. The finalists for that are Tash Aw for The Harmony Silk Factory; Diana Evans for 26a; Peter Hobbs for The Short Day Dying; and Rachel Zadok for Gem Squash Tokoloshe.
Last month, Ben Marcus published a 10,000-word essay titled “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction,” in Harper’s Magazine. Now Sherman Alexie has written a letter to the editor that quite rightly points out that:
Does Ben Marcus, educated at NYU and Brown, employed by Columbia, and published by Anchor, Vintage, and Harper’s, truly believe that he is an excluded experimentalist? Does he honestly believe that Jonathan Franzen, educated at Swarthmore, once employed by Harvard, and published by FSG and Harper’s, is somehow more elitist? Or is Franzen the populist? Or is a populist elitist? Is there really much difference between Marcus and Franzen? This East Coast – East Coast Literary Rap War reminds me of the Far Side cartoon in which a lone penguin, suffering in a crowd of millions of exactly similar penguins, rises and shouts, “I just have to be me!”
Sherman Alexie
Seattle, Wash.
Very well put. On a related note, Jess Row recently wrote a piece in Slate in which he argued that:
[Marcus] can’t resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past–Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner–as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can’t be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn’t it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien regimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?
Alexie text swiped from Maud Newton, via Tom Hopkins.
The Washington Post has a longish profile of Zadie Smith. Yes, there is a mention of her cheekbones. My God, does it ever occur to these people that the woman is a writer?
Gautam Malkani, a British writer whose first novel sparked a bidding war when it was circulated among editors, has been dubbed the “new Zadie Smith.” No word on what his cheekbones look like, but I’m sure they’ll find something in his looks to comment on. The Zadie label was also applied to Diana Evans, another author making her debut. Says Anitha Sethi:
And yet, if I hear the term “the new Zadie/Monica” one more time I may be forced to kill myself by banging my head against the pavement of Brick Lane. It’s something that young non-white authors are finding increasingly difficult to escape: the young half-Nigerian writer Diana Evans found herself tagged in the press as “the new Zadie” though her novel is an exploration of a twin sister’s suicide. Since publishing has in recent years become more publicity-driven, the first question from the putative bookseller is: “What is the book comparable to?”
Apparently, no one thinks of asking: “Is it any good?”
George Saunders is interviewed over at Gothamist. Sample question/answer:
Have you ever lived in NYC? Where and when?
I’ve lived in NYC twice: 1) Two summers ago, courtesy of some dear friends, on the Upper East Side, who let us stay with them while our daughter attended the Barnard pre-college program; and 2) A few years from now, in the future, when I have become a wealthy doddering old fart/former writer, who can finally afford to live in NY, and who dodders from bookstore to bookstore, talking about the glory days and harrumphing out again when the bastards don’t have my books in stock.
Read it all here.