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.

O.J. — now with singing and dancing!

With his “confessional” book scrapped, O.J. is turning to musical theatre to get his story out.

Okay, no he’s not. But at this point, would anyone be shocked if he was?

In any case, Ben Greenman at McSweeney’s has created “Fragments from If I Did It! The Musical” for those interested in wickedly funny musical satire.

Related links:
Sing along with McSweeney’s

CSI: Litter Box

In Other Media probably isn’t the place for this, but it makes fun of David Caruso’s tremendously cheesy performance on CSI: Miami, which is the most hilariously over-the-top acting just about anywhere. And it’s from McSweeney’s, so that’s book-related, right? (To ensure there is some direct book-content in this post, check out the other link to another McSweeney’s piece that imagines the feedback Joyce would have received had he submitted Ulysses in a creative writing workshop.)

The premise of Brian Graham’s piece about Caruso is summed up in the title: “David Caruso Scolds His Cat About Its Lackadaisical Litter-Box Use.” Writes Graham, in the voice of Caruso’s character Lieutenant Horatio Caine: “You can purr all you like, but I know that the purr is a lie. I trusted you to use the litter box. The rule was clear and indisputable, and yet you broke it. Again and again. Right on the kitchen floor.”

Related links:
Click here for the McSweeney’s piece on Caruso and his cat
Click here for the McSweeney’s piece about Joyce

Colour my bookshelf (absolutely not about James Frey)

Ever walked into a bookstore and noticed that one of the employees was getting cute with the endcaps — devoting one of them entirely to yellow-covered titles, for instance? In the fall of 2004, San Francisco’s Adobe Bookshop took that approach to the extreme by hosting an installation called “There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World” — 20,000 books arranged specifically by colour.

Related links:
Click here for photos of the installation
Click here for some general information (from McSweeney’s)
Click here for an interview with creator Chris Cobb (from McSweeney’s)

Tubthumping through the ages

The National Endowment for the Arts’ recent report on the sorry state of American reading habits and the withering of the printed word is still generating debate in the U.S. In an essay for The Village Voice, Paul Collins, an editor at McSweeney’s Books, argues that by defining “literary reading” as the consumption of poetry, poems, and fiction, the association’s methodology was flawed from the start: “It will come as news to historians and memoirists, working in the two most vibrantly evolving genres of the last decade, that what they create does not constitute ‘reading.’ Nor, for that matter, do essays or graphic narratives.” Collins also points out that cultural conservatives such as the NEA’s Dana Gioia have been warning — usually in the same thundering, Old Testament tones — of the imminent demise of the book for at least a century, pinning this impending catastrophe on everything from the electric lamp to the automobile to the television.

Related links:
Read Paul Collins’ piece in The Village Voice