Here’s some interesting stuff to waste away your Monday afternoon:

• Publisher’s Lunch told me about this new blog The Written Nerd, written by another independent bookseller. She works at Labyrinth Books in NYC. It’s pretty interesting so far.
• Ed has another episode of the Bat Segundo available for your listening pleasure. This time he speaks with author Jennifer Weiner.
• And Robert Birnbaum spoke recently with Rick Moody, whose new book The Diviners takes on television.
• Pages magazine has an article on the Litblog Co-op, though there is some incorrect info there. We will not be announcing the next pick until January, not December 15th.
• I love this interview Deborah Solomon did with Jean Baudrillard.
  

  Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories.

That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

• Joshua Glenn is one of the stars of the Globe these days. Check out his article about the spirit of utopia and science fiction.
• Jenny Davidson wrote a review of The Trouble with Tom for the Village Voice. I’ve been hearing more and more about this book. Has anyone else read it?
• Nextbook has a slew of new articles up and they now usually offer a podcast with interviews of authors as well with each article.
• Last, but not least, I was unable to record Haruki Murakami speaking at the First Parish Church last Friday. There were at least 500 people in attendance though and I thought the whole thing went very well. Murakami spoke about writing novels vs. short stories—he’s pretty funny which I was not expecting. I still find it amazing to think that I was about 10 feet away from one of my literary heroes. His latest novel will be available in the Spring.

At a ceremony in Oxford, Mississippi, John Grisham announced the 2005 winners of the National Book Award. They are:

• Fiction
  Europe Central by William Vollman
• Nonfiction
  The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• Poetry
  Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin
• Young People’s Literature
  The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

The fiction prize shocked me a little. I think everyone expected E.L. Doctorow to win for his book The March. Vollman is not exactly the most well recognized author around. His work seems underappreciated by most. Plus Europe Central clocks in at 832 pages. Ron has a first hand account of the awards ceremony, where the gasps were audible when the Fiction award was announced. The rest of the awards went pretty much the way I thought. I would have been shocked if Didion had not won.

On a side note, I like the fact that someone at the National Book Award has photoshopped the NBA gold medallion on the pictures of the books. Classy.

• I shouldn’t be shocked that Nicole Richie’s new book (I am more shocked with the fact that she’s even written one) has gotten some attention on the web that past week. And now the NYT has a huge article on her:
  

  “She’s the most amazing person I’ve ever seen on TV in my life,” gushed one teenage girl, who was near tears. “I live for her. I’d do anything to talk to her.”

  She wasn’t the only one living for Ms. Richie that evening. A teenage boy, wearing lip gloss and a hint of mascara, walked away from the table hyperventilating as he clutched an autographed copy of “Diamonds” close to his chest. “Oh … my … God,” he said between deep breaths. “Nicole just said I was cool! Nicole just said I was cool!” And so it went for nearly two hours, Ms. Richie scribbling her signature and sprinkling happy dust while unabashedly giddy fans fawned all over her.

  Uhm, yeah.

• One of my favorite blog people Ed has a new edition of his podcast The Bat Segundo Show available for your listening pleasure. This edition features Lizzie Skurnick and Wendy Lesser.
• Sherman Alexie wrote a letter to the editors of Harper’s in response to Ben Marcus’ article from last month’s issue “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It“. I’ll quote the letter which I saw at Laila’s, which she saw at Maud’s who saw it elsewhere (I actually have the new issue of Harper’s at home. I just haven’t gotten to it yet as I am still 3 weeks behind in New Yorkers. It never ends):
  

  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.
  Purple Monkey Banana

  (You know, like the telephone game?)

The November Boldtype is up. They are calling this month’s ‘The Kinship Issue’.

I liked this interview with John Banville. He makes a lot of sense:

“He’s a wonderful writer, and I think he made a mistake,” he said of Mr. McEwan. “I just felt he was offering a completely spurious and unbelievable version of life. His protagonist was still in love with his wife after all those years, can never have been unfaithful to her; both his children loved each other. It’s just not life as we know it. Many people would say: ‘Oh, well, that’s just Banville. You’re sick. What do you know about life?’ It’s possible. This is just a book review. I didn’t mean it to be a grand statement.”

I like the last bit about it just being a book review. We all make such big deals about them–the article itself even references Kakutani’s negative review of Banville from yesterday–but really they are just opinions in the end. Banville seemed to expect better from McEwan and was disappointed when the book failed to deliver for him.

And this is just ludicrous.

Read here for an interesting discussion on chick lit. Are you pro or against? I haven’t made up my mind. On the one hand, I find some of the stories too simplistic, not to mention the pastel theme that publishers seem to be pushing. A pink cover with a martini glass/shoe/lipstick immediately turns me off. But on the other hand, there’s probably a wide variety of books deemed chick lit out there. It feels too snobby to dismiss an entire genre of books. An while I might not be as vehement as Maud Newton or Jessa Crispin, but I still haven’t found my experience accurately reflected in any of these books. I don’t have any deep desire to settle down and have kids. And I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder sacrificing my chances of having marrying and having kids, which again I don’t want. Yes, I am simplifying. But let’s not pretend that chick lit is an accurate representation for all women. I don’t know where I fit into this argument. It doesn’t represent me and I wouldn’t call it “literary” in the same way that Murakami is “literary”, but still….

Robert Birnbaum has posted another wonderful interview, this time with author Adam Nicolson. Nicolson wrote God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, which I have on good authority, namely my boyfriend’s grandmother, is a wonderful book and most recently he has published Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar.

Have I mentioned the Soft Skull Press blog? It’s colorful and fun. Today Richard Nash posted about publishing a book about Iranian bloggers.

And speaking of Soft Skull Press, one of their books, the memoir of cultural icon Lisa Carver, got a great review from the Boston Globe of all places (I was shocked too).

And trying to prove me wrong about them, the Globe also has an article about NaNoWriMo, that is National Novel Writing Month, wherein people try to write 50,000 words (about 175 pages) by the end of November.

I’ve neglected to point out the exciting discussions happening over at the LBC website, where currently Nadeem Aslam’s second novel Maps For Lost Lovers is being discussed.

And mentioned elsewhere, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes put out by Andrews McMeel, is one of the most expensive books to make the NYT Bestseller list. Too bad the publisher has no plans to reprint it and the supply is running out. The same thing happened in the 2003 holiday season with The Complete Far Side, which ran out quickly before Christmas. They finally reprinted it sometime in 2004 when they realized the demand. Sheesh, publishers.

Here’s an interview with Jamie Byng, the man behind Canongate Books. He’s made a splash recently with the newly launched The Myths series featuring such venerable writers as Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Karen Armstrong.

Also, this weekend brings us (along with some sunshine I am hoping) the 29th Annual Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. It’s usually pretty rowdy, but good fun. Last year, I saw 2 guys get into a fistfight over this first edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica (really it was because one guy was claiming Newton was a total plebe). It was nasty! Okay, I made that up. It is good fun though.

I love getting my issue of Cook’s Illustrated every 2 months. I find the magazine both useful and fun. That goes for the several cookbooks that I own from Christopher Kimball–The Cook’s Bible, The Kitchen Detective, Baking Illustrated. So you can understand how excited I was to see their latest endeavor at BEA back in June—a huge compendium of over 1200 recipes with tips and charts and color photos called The American’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. My store received our copies today (don’t ask me about their ordering policies either, that’s a whole other story) and I have to say that it is one of the worst packaged books I have ever seen. It’s a 3 ring binder with pages and dividers, which is fine, except that the fucking thing comes unassembled. You get this crappily shrink wrapped binder with the pages and dividers in its own shrink wrapping inside. The problem with the crappy shrink wrap on the outside is that it’s too loose, so the package inside pops holes into it. The whole thing is too fucking stupid. Who would buy this? I was thinking about it, but certainly not after I’ve seen it. And particularly not after having to assemble one (you see, they give you instructions all handily printed on a card that includes one of those annoying subscription cards that fall out of magazines–I fucking hate those, but I digress) for a display copy. Imagine shopping for a cookbook, looking at an array of beautiful spines and you see this one. Imagine pulling it off the shelf and maybe those individually wrapped pages inside finally break loose. Or imagine the damage that will be done to the display copy with the pages undone (rememeber in high school when you yanked too hard on a page and it ripped out of the rings). So America’s Test Kitchen, you might want to think about this the next time you produce a cookbook.

They awarded the Nobel to Harold Pinter today “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”.

Tomorrow they announce the Nobel Prize for Literature (I am keeping my fingers crossed for Danielle Steele. It’s her year!) and today the National Book Award announced their finalists (the winner will be announced on November 16th). They are as follows:
Fiction

* The March by E.L. Doctorow (Random House)
* Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon)
* Trance by Christopher Sorrentino (FSG)
* Holy Skirts by Rene Steinke (William Morrow)
* Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (Viking)

Nonfiction

* Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan
Burdick (FSG)
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius by Leo Damrosch
(Houghton Mifflin)
* The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf)
* 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside
the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn (Times
Books)
* Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry

* Where Shall I Wander by John Ashbery (Ecco)
* Star Dust: Poems by Frank Bidart (FSG)
* Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 by Brendan
Galvin (Louisiana State University Press)
* Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin (Copper
Canyon)
* The Moment’s Equation by Vern Rutsala (Ashland Poetry
Press)

Young People’s Literature

* The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall (Knopf)
* Where I Want to Be by Adele Griffin (Putnam)
* Inexcusable by Chris Lynch (Atheneum)
* Autobiography of My Dead Brother by Walter Dean Myers
(HarperTempest)
* Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles (Harcourt)

The Quills were announced last night, but I am not bothering with them. Look here for the winners.