The Washington Post Book Review has started a bookblog cleverly called Short Stack.

I woke up this morning bright and early to learn that Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’m both shocked and delighted. None of the articles I’ve read discussing possible winners mentioned her. She’s had a long career as an author and she didn’t even finish high school!

• The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded tomorrow at 1pm Stockholm time. Bloomberg news has a rundown of the current contenders, which include Syrian-born poet and critic Adonis, South Korean author Ko Un, and Philip Roth.
• Speaking of awards, the National Book Award Finalists were announced today. I’m posting the Fiction and Non-Fiction, which I think are good lists. Look at the list here to see the Children’s and Poetry:
  Fiction

  Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
  Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Fiction judges: Francine Prose (chair), Andrew Sean Greer,
  Walter Kirn, David Means, and Joy Williams.

  Non-Fiction

  Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
  Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
  Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
  (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
  Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction judges: David Shields (chair), Deborah Blum,
  Caroline Elkins, Annette Gordon-Reed, and James Shapiro.

• Yay! Self-Promotion. Rather, store promotion. A customer told us that Ellen Pompeo, of the show Grey’s Anatomy, mentioned my store as one of her favorites in a recent profile in AmericanWay.
• More self-promtion: I wrote an article on the NEIBA trade show for Bookselling This Week. It’s my first piece of paid journalism!
• Bostonist interviews Shalom Auslander, who will be appearing at Brookline Booksmith tomorrow evening at 7 pm. Yes, I’m promoting another store’s event, mainly because I like this book so much. I’ll be there and still be a square.

Update: I fixed the link on the article I wrote. Should work now.

I’m back from the NEIBA trade show with a small cold and almost no voice (I sound like Marge Simpson). I’m also trying to catch up on email from the past few weeks. Once again, I’m off on Thursday for the weekend for the dreaded parent meeting—my parents and Mr. Bookdwarf’s parents meeting for the first time. My stomach is in knots already. This might explain the cold. Meanwhile, there’s loads of interesting stuff around the internets:

• I don’t read the American Scholar, but this article on the many young authors writing in the borough of Brooklyn sounds quite interesting.
  

  To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.

• Amazon has announced the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award today in cooperation with Penguin. 5000 unpublished authors can submit their English language manuscript, which will be critiqued by the top Amazon reviewers. Then the 100 judged best will be passed over to a panel consisting author Elizabeth Gilbert, agent Eric Simonoff, Penguin imprint founder Amy Einhorn, and NBCC President John Freeman. The winner receives a $25,000 advance and a publishing contract that they must take “as is”. Ed has wisely brought up the ethics of John Freeman’s participation. They criticize bloggers for their code of ethics, yet the NBCC is okay with closely aligning themselves with one large corporate publisher?
  
• Six leading feminists recall the book that changed their lives in the Guardian.
• I hate to say it, but I had never heard of Goodreads until I read about it on Shelf Awareness (second item) this morning. Does anyone else use it or have thoughts about it? They offer other options besides Amazon, but Powell’s isn’t shown immediately—they’re in the other category. It would be nice if they were the second option.
  
• Martha Stewart and Amy Sedaris talk bongwater!
  

Tomorrow the trade show for NEIBA (New England Independent Booksellers Association) starts in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s a chance for booksellers and publishers to come together, talk about upcoming books, gossip, etc. Imagine a smaller, homier version of BEA.
I’m having dinner with a few authors on Friday night: Rudolph Delson, author of Maynard & Jennica and Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else. Being the good bookseller that I am, I’m trying to read both books before meeting them. That’s only fair. I finished Delson’s book last night and started Hunt’s. They are very different books. M&J is a modern love story told through the voices of 35 different people, while invention tells the story of an unlikely friendship between an elderly Nikolai Tesla and a young chambermaid in the hotel where he lives.

A great trailer for Shalom Auslander’s forthcoming Foreskin’s Lament.

The Harvard Coop—not to be confused with independently owned Harvard Book Store—called the police last Thursday on three students who were collecting information for a student run textbook website after they refused to leave. The Coop claims it’s intellectual property. Also, though the police showed up, no one was forced to leave. How very civilized.

The Huffington Post posted about the Harvard Coop asking the student when they saw him writing down price information on textbooks. Except the picture they include is the wrong store! They’ve got a picture of my store, the independent one, not the Barnes & Noble managed one.

Yes, it’s confusing with the names. I have to explain all the time that we are not in fact the official Harvard University textbook store. But we’ve been around for 75 years, so we’re not likely to change the name anytime soon.

• Barnes and Noble exposed! A student was asked to leave the Harvard MIT Coop after writing down prices of several textbooks. the best part is that no where in the article does it mention that the Coop is run by Barnes & Noble. People are often shocked when I tell them that—often people who have lived in the area for years. It’s not a state secret that B&N and Follett run the majority of the bookstores in the country. I think there is only one college campus bookstore in the Boston area that is still independent.
• More Shalom Auslander is always a good thing.
• I agree with Scott at Slushpile about Peter Sacks’s whiny essay. Cry me a river.
• Levi Asher’s online symposium on book pricing is fascinating.
• Ed has jumped wholeheartedly onto the Remainder bandwagon. This is what Alex, a fellow bookseller at my store, had to say about it:
  

  This weird, wonderful novel latched onto my brain for the duration of the week I spent reading it. I found myself very directly reminded of its nowhere man narrator as I clambered up the stairs to my apartment at the end of each workday –- reminded of his emerging obsession with identifying and capturing authentic, meaningful, everyday moments. Readers, actors, artists, and observers of all sorts will find something to brood upon in this story of a man who has lost his memory in a violent accident. He is provided with nearly infinite resources to repair his fractured reality; what results is surreal.

• Ed also has a rundown of the panel report on the crisis in book reporting. James Marcus also has posted about it.

Ah, the Mamas and the Papas.  I returned from a weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia late last night in time to watch the Sox lose to the Yankees. That’s okay. I’m not going to let this ruin my birthday. Monday birthdays are odd. So far it feels like a regular day, except for the lovely sweet-smelling, pink tulips sitting next to me on the desk.  I read Richard Russo’s new book The Bridge of Sighs (on sale next week) on the plane ride there and back. I expect this book will get some glorious reviews. I have only a few small reservations about it, but it’s still quite a damn good book. I think Mameve Medwed’s review in yesterday’s Globe somewhat off the mark. She makes the story seem too simplistic, but she’s correct when she says “whatever the scale of their lives, Russo’s characters – the stars and the walk-ons – are gorgeously drawn. The writing is always in service of illuminating them”.