Category: literary life

Ladies and gentlemen, the New York Times Book Review has printed a two-page profile of actress/singer/whatever-it-is-she-is and now novelist Nicole Richie.

The Oregon Book Awards were handed out last Friday at a ceremony here in Portland. Local boy (and fellow southwest dweller) Marc Acito took home the Ken Kesey prize for the novel for How I Paid For College while Barry Lopez received the H.L. David Award for short fiction for Resistance. You can read Jeff Baker’s report at The Oregonian for more details.

Related:
Register Guard: Sibling authors share Oregon Book Award joy.
Official Oregon Book Awards site.
Marc Acito’s book recommendation for Moorishgirl.

Late last year, I reported about the town of Salinas, California losing all three of its libraries because of ‘cost-cutting measures’ and I was somewhat surprised that people had voted against tax increases to keep the libraries open.

But here’s some news. The good people of Salinas have changed their mind, and have now voted in favor of the tax increase, which means that libraries in John Steinbeck’s hometown will remain open.

“Medal Fatigue,” A.O. Scott’s essay in the New York Times this past weekend, might be of interest to you if you care about lit prizes and have some time to kill. Neither of which should apply to me, but apparently it does, because I actually bothered to read and link to it. The only mildy interesting snippet is this (emphasis mine):

My only prediction for the coming N.B.A.’s is the same one I offer each year when, in my day job, I am asked about the Oscars. I have, at the moment, no idea who will win, and a year from now I will not be able to remember who won. I would hope, though, that in the near future English’s book wins some prize for which it is eligible. This shouldn’t be hard, given that there are now, he writes, around a hundred prizes for every thousand books published in the United States. (If he had made a movie, his chances would be even better, since, as he writes, “by the end of the 20th century, the number of film awards distributed each year exceeded the number of full-length films being produced.”)

So there. The Times could have printed these 20 words and instead devoted the other 1,300 words to writing about…books. Novel idea, I know.

Speaking of the Times, the Sunday Book Review section also contained a full-length review of (gasp!) a book of fiction in translation. Granted, it was about The Successor, the new novel by Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare, but still a great surprise and a delight. Here’s a tiny excerpt from Lorraine Adams’s review:

The novel opens with Kadare’s characteristic simplicity. “The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14.” The Successor (his name is never given) “succumbed to a nervous depression and took his own life with a firearm.” But when Yugoslav radio suggests he might have been murdered, Albanian television issues “bulletins to allow for both versions of the event.” This is the beginning of the novel’s permutations of the Successor’s last night. Looming over the search for the truth is not only manmade tyranny but the shadow of an even greater power: “In the middle of the sky, which stretched as far as the eye could see and carried the news far and wide, stood a high clump of clouds like a celestial wrath.”

An interesting essay by Kadare’s translator appeared at the Complete Review last May, discussing the challenges of re-translating an author’s work. (Rather than translating directly from the Albanian, David Bellos had access only to the French text.)

Or different name. You’re an author and your sales are falling, so what do you do? Why, take a new name, of course.