Bookmarks: Moore on Barthelme, Updike on Cheever, plus more shakeups in the U.S. retail sector

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Lorrie Moore reviews the new Donald Barthelme biography (you can hear her thoughts here).
• The late John Updike had an early look at the John Cheever biography.
• Apparently, one of the century’s great correspondents was Samuel Beckett, “the man who said ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’”
• More layoffs at Borders. This time, the retailing giant cuts 742 jobs (nearly 3% of its workforce), most of them managerial positions at its superstores.
• Meanwhile, competitor Barnes & Noble buys e-book retailer Fictionwise.com for $15.7-million.
• A surefire pick-me-up: Author Tobias Wolff, onstage with John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats) in New York City. Wait for the chorus, when the grandfatherly Wolff chimes in.

John Updike dies

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and man of letters John Updike has died of lung cancer, at the age of 76. From the Associated Press:

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.

An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards.

Update: the New York Times obit.

Nobel jury head slams U.S. authors

According to The Guardian, Nobel jury head Horace Engdahl has got a bit of a hate-on for U.S. authors, describing U.S. writing as “insular and ignorant”:

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that U.S. writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” which he said dragged down the quality of their work. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Engdahl appears to be backpedalling a bit now, but he hasn’t offered any apologies. And we’re not saying he should: he’s entitled to his incredibly sweeping, pretentious, pointy-headed opinion.

The Nobel jury is expected to announce this year’s winner sometime over the next few weeks, and Engdahl’s comments have oddsmakers predicting that contenders like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates needn’t bother to clear space on their mantles.

Oh, and for an alternate opinion of U.S. writing, the L.A. Times contacted Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation that administers the National Book Awards, who said he wanted to send Engdahl a reading list of U.S. literature.

“Such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age,” he said.

Bookmarks: new Bond in Russia!, new Thunderbirds everywhere!, no new autobiographical characters in Salman Rushdie novels!

Some book-related links:

• New James Bond novel gets Russian publisher (MI6)
• New Thunderbirds novels after more than forty years (SWFA Pressbook)
• Salman Rushdie vows to stop creating autobiographical characters (The Canadian Press)
• Mold: the enemy of rare books (Chicago Tribune)
• Woman robs dirty bookshop (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
• John Updike on Flann O’Brien (The New Yorker)
• Deciphering authors’ handwriting (Slate)
• Leah McLaren: our own Paris Hilton? (Seven Oaks)

Smiley’s boogie nights

American author Jane Smiley defends her sexytimes-filled new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times. She says she was inspired by The Decameron and “wanted to go where Boccaccio had led — not for pornographic intent (I was not aiming to arouse myself) but for artistic intent, for the pleasures of working with new material, the insights to be gained thereby, the formal experiment of it.” On a less lofty note, she also describes herself during the writing process as “sitting in my office, drinking Diet Coke, cogitating, chortling, plotting and enjoying myself in private.”

As Smiley notes in her piece, the graphic sex scenes startled even that old satyr John Updike, who wrote in his New Yorker review of the book, “The sexual descriptions set a new mark for explicitness in a work of non-pornographic intent.” The review, for the record, is an admiring one. (Wait until Updike gets a load of Alan Moore’s Lost Girls.)

Canada’s “ice queen” set to conquer world

A story on the Independent site claims to have inside knowledge on which authors are being considered for the new International Man Booker Prize, which will be awarded next year for an author’s “literary achievement” (not, as in the case of the regular Man Booker Prize, for a single book written by an author from the Commonwealth). Though the three judges for the new prize will not be announced until next week — with the shortlist announcement scheduled for early next year — the article claims that the five serious contenders for the £60,000 are V.S. Naipaul, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Roth, and Margaret Atwood, who is described as “Canada’s ice queen.”

Related links:
Read the Independent story