Bookmarks: closing libraries, rewarding booksellers, and filming Chabon

Some book-related (but not Valentine’s Day-themed, alas) links:

• Victoria library locks out workers, shuts down all branches (Victoria Times Colonist)
• California bookseller gets $500k MacArthur grant (MSNBC)
• The Coen Brothers to filmify Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Variety)
• Toronto, according to Michael Redhill’s Consolation – with spoilers! (Spacing)
• James Wolcott on Donald Barthelme (Bookforum)
• Borders unveils its first shiny new-style store* (Reuters)

* and it has its own Long Pen booth! (MLive.com)

Bookmarks: Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday wish list, the LongPen in the NYT and more

Some book-related links:

• Arthur C. Clarke makes his wish list for his 90th birthday (The Guardian)
• Have you heard about this LongPen thing? Some people haven’t, apparently (The New York Times)
• Derek McCormack’s fashionable Christmas wish list (The National Post)
• The day the plane hit the booktore (WKRC in Cincinnati – so close!)
• Mystery author Maureen Jennings on her brush with death (Toronto Star)
• Christian bookseller in China arrested (USA Today)
• California library accepts food donations in lieu of overdue fines (North County Times)
• China’s oldest library stays open late (China View)
• Write books, lose weight (Everything Alabama)

Major U.S. book awards announced

The nominations for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle award were announced last weekend, and, as always, a few big names were snubbed in the fiction category, most notably Thomas Pynchon. The fiction list was also noteworthy in that none of the 2006 National Book Award nominees – including the eventual winner, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker – were included.

Two of the nominations went to relative newcomers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf), and Kiran Desai for her Man Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic, and Penguin here in Canada). The other nominations went to three authors already ensconced at the top of the American literary scene: Dave Eggers, for his tale of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war, What Is the What (McSweeney’s), Richard Ford, for the third installment in his Frank Bascombe series, The Lay of the Land (Knopf), and Cormac McCarthy, for his post-apocalyptic tale The Road (Knopf).

Just a day after the Book Critics Circle announced their nominations (the full list of which can be seen here), the American Library Association announced the winners of their annual Newbery and Caldecott awards for children’s literature.

The Newbery Medal, for a work of prose fiction, went to a surprise winner: the relatively untouted The Higher Power of Lucky (Simon & Schuster), by Susan Patron, about a motherless girl in a small California town. Meanwhile the Caldecott Medal, for picture books, went to illustrator David Wiesner for his wordless tale Flotsam (Clarion), about a boy who finds an underwater camera at the beach. The award makes Wiesner a three-time Caldecott winner: he won for Tuesday in 1991, and for The Three Pigs in 2001.

It’s never too late

At the age of 79, American poet Landis Everson will be publishing his first collection. A recipient of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, an honour that celebrates the achievements of poets over the age of 50 who have yet to publish books, Everson collected his prize of $10,000 and an offer to publish his manuscript at a ceremony earlier this month.

Everson was an unsung member of the Berkeley Renaissance, a mid-century American literary movement that counts among its more acclaimed members such literary luminaries as Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. However, unlike Duncan or Spicer, Everson lost his audience and impetus for writing when the group disbanded in 1961. He moved to San Luis Obispo, California, where he made his primary living buying and renovating old houses. Around 1994, he quit renovating, citing weakness and old age. “I was waiting to die,” he says in an article by Dinitia Smith of The New York Times, “very patiently, very agreeably, when the phone rang.”

Everson was rediscovered by Ben Mazer, a poet and editor who located Everson while writing an article about the Berkeley Renaissance. Mazer solicited old poems, got Everson to write new ones, and sent them all off to be considered for the Emily Dickinson Award, part of the Pegasus family of awards intended to honour under-recognized poets and forms. Other Pegasus awards include prizes in criticism and humorous poetry, as well as the Neglected Masters Award, which goes to a under-recognized yet significant American poet. Everson’s inaugural collection, entitled Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005, will be released by Graywolf Press.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times