Bookish links from around the Web:
- Happy (belated) birthday, Margaret Atwood. The author turned 70 yesterday
- Colum McCann has won the fiction prize at the National Book Awards for his novel Let the Great World Spin. Also at last night’s gala in New York, Dave Eggers picked up the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community
- Expanding on James Wood’s assertion that “prizes are the new reviews,” Salon.com’s Laura Miller discusses the emerging trend of “vanity book awards”
- Is the Apple tablet dead?
- The Literary Review has released the shortlist for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. On this year’s list are Philip Roth – no surprise there – Nick Cave, Paul Theroux, and Jonathan Littell
- Lou Reed, Maureen “Moe” Tucker, and Doug Yule, three members of the Velvet Underground, are reuniting for the first time in more than a decade, at – where else? – a branch of the New York Public Library, to promote a new coffee-table book, The Velvet Underground: New York Art
- » Bookmarks: Margaret Atwood on friendship, Stephen King in Toronto, and more
- » Bookmarks: Superhero Bill Cosby, scary Margaret Atwood, and the Poet of Swinging Suicides
- » Bookmarks: more praise for Margaret Atwood, Ted Kennedy, and David Mitchell
- » Bookmarks: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, the Brontë sisters, and more
- » McGraw-Hill CEO blows Apple’s cover
It’s now impossible to get through life without winning some kind of award. And, no matter how meagre the prize people seem proud as a pickled roach to receive one. How about The Libertarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community? Where did the National Book Award Committee come up with that one? A very creative lot they and so modest in the Age of Obama. Had George Bush been president the word “World” would have replaced “American.” I hope it comes with a peel-back seal and a plastic wreath cause you need a costume to go with something like that.