Bookmarks: Birthday wishes for Margaret Atwood, and more

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

Who will win the Nobel?

It’s not quite the biggest reward that can be given to a writer (that would be inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, or maybe Richard and Judy’s), but the Nobel Prize for Literature is nothing to sneeze at – just look what it has done for last year’s winner, J.M.G. Le Clézio (who?). The prize is to be handed out tomorrow, and the international book media abounds with speculation. That the head of the prize  recently remarked that the Nobel has been too “Eurocentric” in its picks has caused some to believe this is America’s year, with maybe Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates heading to Stockholm.

As far as the oddsmakers are concerned, however, the prize is most likely to go to Israeli writer Amos Oz. According to the odds posted at Ladbrokes.com, Oz has a 3-1 chance of walking away with it, the same German author Herta Müller (who?).

Alice Munro is farther down the list at 25-1, the same odds as Bob Dylan(?). Atwood is 40-1, and Ondaatje is 50-1.

Whoever wins, the odds of someone posting, within 24 hours of the announcement, a video mashup on YouTube featuring Kanye West interrupting the ceremony in Stockholm are about 2-1.

Senior vice-president at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt quits

Becky Saletan, senior vice-president and publisher of the U.S.-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has quit, effective Dec. 10. From The Canadian Press:

Saletan had served in the job since January 2008, when she was appointed to head the newly merged Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin divisions.

The company has been in the news for an alleged freeze on acquiring new books. Blumenfeld has offered conflicting statements, saying the publisher of authors such as Philip Roth and Günter Grass had “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts,” but later acknowledging the policy didn’t apply to education and children’s books and a mystery book imprint.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has reportedly been hit hard by the tight credit market and any halt on acquisitions is widely believed to be in anticipation of a possible sale.

Depressed economy not all bad news for publishers

The economic turmoil in global financial markets is making a lot of folks depressed (ha!), but it apparently hasn’t stopped one mega-publisher from handing out generous bonuses to staff. The same week that Houghton Mifflin announced it was temporarily suspending new manuscript acquisitions, Hachette Book Group revealed its holiday munificence. As Motoko Rich writes in The New York Times:

As first reported by Publishers Lunch, an industry newsletter, Hachette is giving bonuses equal to one week’s salary to every employee in the company, in addition to the regular bonuses for which staff members are eligible.

Hachette, which recently opened a Canadian office, can afford to throw a little money around. Its Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing units publish superstar authors James Patterson, David Baldacci, and Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series has begun to outsell even J.K. Rowling.

Houghton Mifflin, on the other hand, publishes writers like Philip Roth and Günter Grass. It can claim literary superiority, but clearly doesn’t have the same clout at the cash register. In times of economic hardship, teen vampires are a better draw than Pulitzer Prize-winners.

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.

Some hard looks at Plimpton

It’s been two and a half years since journalist and author Philip Gourevitch took over as editor of  The Paris Review, and now The New York Observer‘s Doree Shafrir sits down with Gourevitch in the Review‘s new Tribeca offices. In the two and a half years that Gourevitch has been on board, the literary journal has introduced more non-fiction and a greater sense of timeliness, while cutting back on its poetry output.

“I thought the magazine just had way too many things in it,” said Mr. Gourevitch. “It had way too many poets—not poems, but poets. Are you telling me, as an editor, that there are 30 poets I must not miss for this quarter? Is there not something else out there, considering that this magazine is not the sole outlet for poetry? I don’t believe it. So then, I think you are actually throwing way too much stuff at me waiting to see if it will stick, and I would much rather be given a much more contained choice.” Today, the magazine has cut its poet quotient by about two-thirds, publishing around 10 per issue.

George Plimpton, of course, founded The Paris Review and ran it until his death in 2003. Plimpton protege Brigid Hughes then took over for a year before the magazine’s board droppped her in favour of Gourevitch. In the Observer piece, Gourevitch offers up some other surprisingly candid assessments of the Plimpton-era Paris Review.

“The first issues were very thin and on light paper, and as it went along it got thicker, and that stabilized. In the last five years it got really fat. It was like 400 pages. It was actually physically hard to open! If you opened it up it would break the spine and snap shut like it didn’t want you to read it, and it kind of had this archaic feel which made it seem as though it wasn’t so classy anymore. So it was a sense that it felt uninviting, and it got thick in the way that made me think—can all this stuff really be that good?”

And:

“You could pick up many issues without knowing what year they were from,” he said. “I mean, you could guess by certain kinds of aesthetic things—probably by the illustrations more than anything, and some texture of the prose—but you wouldn’t know that there was a civil rights movement or a Vietnam War or a decolonization of the world.”

And since Plimpton is already rolling in his grave, anyway…. Over at Slate, Timothy Noah takes the occasion of Philip Roth’s new novel, Exit Ghost – which includes a long encomium to Plimpton – to argue that the revered journalist wasn’t all that.

Plimpton, with his antique upper-class accent and his penchant for name-dropping, might have made an ideal goyische target for Roth [as an object of fictional satire] had he been the pompous sort, which apparently he wasn’t. But neither was Plimpton anybody’s beau ideal of a writer of nonfiction. If one were to compile a list of the 20th century’s finest journalists, it’s doubtful he’d make the top 50.

Bookmarks – Tom Stoppard is tone-deaf, Rob Allen was a traitor, Martin Amis is a racist, Dick Pound is manly, and more

Some book-related links:

• Tom Stoppard, author of Rock ‘n’ Roll, admits he doesn’t really “get” rock ‘n’ roll (Vanity Fair)
• Stephen Henighan eulogizes poet, editor, and professor Rob Allen somewhat… Henighanistically (Geist)
  
• Dick Pound (hey, he’s an author, too) named the man with the second-most manly name in the world (Cracked)
• Finally: James Wood on Philip Roth’s newest (New Yorker)
• Amis père and fils racist, says literary critic Terry Eagleton (The Independent)

Bookmarks – Naomi Klein loved/hated by the National Post, Vincent Lam’s first draft crap, and more

Some book-related links:

• The National Post paid for excerpts from Naomi Klein’s book, then slammed her in its editorial pages – um, isn’t this usually called “editorial independence”? (The New York Times)
• Vincent Lam on bridging the doctor/writer divide and his “crap” first drafts (Entertainment Weekly)
• James Wood’s first New Yorker review – of the new Roth, Russo, Sebold, translation of the Book of Psalms! (New Yorker)
• The most-banned books of the year (Los Angeles Times)
• A guide to Philip Roth (Sunday Times)

David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels

Over at Nextbook, David Bezmozgis writes a lengthy tribute to the late American author Leonard Michaels, a writer who not only served as a formative influence on Bezmozgis, but eventually become a mentor, friend, and confidante.

I should say at this point that though I was a dedicated reader and entertained writerly ambitions, I knew next to nothing about the practical realities of publishing. I paid no attention to and couldn’t distinguish between the various publishing houses and knew nothing about their relative merits or reputations. I knew nothing about the arcana of lists, deals, rights, advances, tours, covers, print runs, or anything else. All books looked the same to me. They all participated equally in the wondrous, enviable state of being published. A more savvy reader, noting the poor availability of Michaels’s books, might have deduced from this something about the state of Michaels’s career, but this never occurred to me. I thought that anybody who wrote as well as he did had to be a great success, on par with Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or any other writer deserving of serious consideration. That his books were almost completely out of print I perceived only as matter of personal inconvenience to me, not anything that would be of consequence to Michaels himself. After all, he had written the books and they had been published. They existed. I imagined that anything beyond that was trivial.

Also at Nextbook is “Honeymoon,” a short story by Michaels that Bezmozgis once wrote a screenplay for, which is what began the relationship between the two writers. (The movie was never made – it’s about a young bride who falls for her mambo-dancing waiter at a Catskills resort. “Many were of the opinion that Dirty Dancing had exhausted the subject,” Bezmozgis writes.)

Can’t we all just get along?

In yet another attempt by a book reviewer to bring some light to her shadowy and sinister vocation, critic Erica Wagner writes in the Times Online of being asked, while speaking to a group of students, that primary question: “How do you tell a book is good?”

In lieu of an answer, Wagner cites the example of Philip Roth’s newest novel, Everyman. While she, along with The Times‘s Douglas Kennedy, found the novel to be brilliant, The New York Times‘s Michiko Kakutani thought the thing was a load of self-indulgent, whiny crap.

“So — who’s right?” Wagner asks. “Somebody’s got to be the decider, right? Right. But here’s the beauty of it. What’s ‘good’ for Kennedy is clearly not ‘good’ for Kakutani.” Reviewers are at the mercy of their emotional responses, she says, so readers should read reviews to be made “curious, not convinced.”

We at In Other Media think that’s a bit of a dodge. But that’s just our opinion!

Related links:
Read Erica Wagner’s piece in the Times Online