by Erin Blakeslee, Nonfiction Editor

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.  The French writer of novels, short stories, essays, and children's books was called  an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization" by the Swedish Academy. Read more here.

by Erin Blakeslee, Nonfiction Editor

The latest Nobel Prize in Literature is set to be announced this Thursday, October 9th, but it's unlikely any U.S. writers will be taking it home.

Horace Engdahl, a Swedish historian and critic who serves as Nobel judge and "permanent secretary", told the Associated Press this week that the "U.S. is too isolated, too insular ... You can't get away from the fact that  Europe still is the centre of the literary world, not the United States."

Now, I am not one to lead a rival chant of "U-S-A! U-S-A!", but I do think Engdahl's comment reveals a rather astonishing ignorance of contemporary literature, of its potentially world-permeating (through diaspora/immigration, through technology) nature, of its arguable lack of a "centre" at all, be it European or American.

A number of excellent articles have been written analyzing Engdahl's comments.  Start with the International Herald Tribune here.

Cam Terwilliger, from issue 20.1, has a new story forthcoming in Mid-American Review, and he recently won a fellowship from the Somerville Arts Council, which you can read about here. Congratulations to Cam.

Issue 20.2 is currently at the printers, and I've heard a rumor that Amina Gautier, whose story "Brooklyn Bridge" was one of our contest finalists, is a finalist for a story collection prize. I'm sure we'll keep you posted as more news comes in. Meanwhile, we'd love to hear from other former contributors on recent successes.

While I still have a blog ID, I'm going to embarrass and offer public congratulations to some members of our staff. First to our editor, Mehdi Okasi, who recently won a statewide National Society of Letters contest and gave a reading down in Bloomington Sunday. Also congratulations to our rising Assistant Director of Creative Writing, Christopher Feliciano Arnold, who recently won Playboy's college fiction contest and will have a story out in Playboy's October issue. Finally congratulations to Mindy Gutowski, whose poem "Affinity" recently won in the AWP intro awards, and is due to be published soon in Artful Dodge.

The NY Times reviews Sarah Boxer's "Ultimate Blogs," an anthology of material culled from blogs between 2005 and 2007. Boxer apparently thought it was a "dreadful" idea when an editor first suggested she edit such a book, but she seems to have come around and, in the words of the reviewer, captured "good bloggy prose that non-blog readers can read." I like the idea of embracing new forms (like blogs), rather than just huffing about the death of good writing (which I do anyway) or dismissing them as cultural trash (which a lot of them are). But I'm thinking this anthology can only capture part of what makes a blog a blog. A lot of people use their blogs for long (often rambling) personal musings, and I guess have a small but interested audience. Those posts would be good for an anthology. But I think my favorite blogs (such as Bookninja or Maud) make better use of the form. They post regularly, keep the posts short, and link to something interesting, so that I can go to their pages for fifteen seconds a day, every day, and find something worthwhile. But those blogs wouldn't be very interesting in an anthology. Or at least I wouldn't buy it.

The UK Times has a pretty good profile of Stoppard here. Looks like they're doing a series of profiles for the Oxford Literary Festival, which you can read more about here.

We all remember the James Frey scandal, where he admitted to gross exaggerations and out-and-out lies in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. His appearance on Oprah took over the news so that Nasdijj went unnoticed. Supposedly a Navajo who grew up in a destitute Spokane reservation, Nasdijj is actually, as Sherman Alexie noted two years ago, just some white guy who got tired of writing porn.

Well here we are, and Misha Defonseca has said her Holocaust memoir was fake, that her parents were not in fact seized by Nazis, and that she did not in fact roam Europe during WWII, or even leave Brussels. She says, "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving." (That raises the issue of truth, I guess. Tim O'Brien says quite eloquently that fiction can lead to important emotional truths. Of course, The Things They Carried is labeled a novel, marketed as fiction.) Finally, the NY Times has the story of Margaret Jones's Love and Consequences, a "memoir" of growing up in a gangland, actually written by Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in a well-to-do section of Los Angeles.

I do think there's something despicable about a person publishing a fraudulent memoir, and something equally despicable about publishers telling authors, "You know, if this were a bit more exciting..." or "You know, if this were your life instead of a novel..." But I'm very interested in our reaction to memoirs as readers. Slap the label on a book (or movie), "Based on a True Story," and we're suddenly involved in a way we couldn't have been before? What does that say about our psychology?

A Guardian writer discusses why sex in literary fiction is doomed to fail. His argument is essentially that if you read these scenes out of context, they're embarrassingly bad writing (hence the Guardian's annual bad sex awards).

In other news, the Guardian also has a podcast of Jane Smiley explaining why there's so much sex in her recent novel, Ten Days in the Hills.

Theresa also asked me to pass along something for those of you in Indiana:

Purdue’s own Don Platt will be giving a poetry reading at Butler University in Indianapolis this Thursday night at 7:30. The reading will be in Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall. Check out the news release here. Platt has published three volumes of poetry, including My Father Says Grace (2007), Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns and Cloud Atlas. He has a fourth forthcoming. A professor of English at Purdue University, he lives in West Lafayette with his wife, the poet Dana Roeser, and their two daughters.

After Don’s beautiful reading at Purdue last March, the thought here is that it might be time for a road trip. We’ve even gotten the word that this promises there will be no snowstorms Thursday night.

--Theresa D. Smith

Guardian reports the Coen Brothers are set to direct the movie adaptation of Michael Chabon's recent The Yiddish Police Man's Union, and that the movie will be "a noir thriller in the vein of Miller's Crossing." No word on when, but it should be interesting. In the interim, for those of you in the Lafayette area, Michael Chabon will be reading at Purdue in April for the annual Literary Awards ceremony.

And now Richard Ford has switched publishers, say the NY Times. Honestly, I'm not sure why this is interesting news. Perhaps people make a big deal out of a major author's big move because they sense some kind of decline in the author-editor relationship, and are perhaps nostalgic for the loyal days of Maxwell Perkins, but, economically, it makes sense. Both Wolfe and Ford put out huge books (I Am Charlotte Simmons and The Lay of the Land), which probably didn't sell as well as publishers hoped. And how could they, seeing as they are both in the 700 page range? So then the publishers didn't want to give them as big of an advance as they're accustomed to, being literary heavyweights and all, so they go somewhere else. What I'm a bit more interested in is what this says about advances for successful authors, and the success rate for really really big books that people (myself included) seem to have forgotten how to read, or just no longer care for. What I'm even more interested is Ford's next book, Canada, which the Times reports is scheduled for release in 2010. Seems like I've been hearing about that book for a while now, and which I think I heard he was keeping in a freezer at one point. Ecco press describes it as a "novel of revenge and violent retribution set on the Saskatchewan prairie, in the early 1960s."

From our events planner, Theresa D. Smith:

Rumor has it the Writer's Guild of America may be back to work on Monday after three months of prickly negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. I think I speak for at least two or three people when I say that the end of the strike, which began back on November 5th of last year, would be oh-so-much-more than welcome. While I wish I could claim literary motivations for my joy, I’m afraid I mostly want to see Hugh Laurie on House, M.D. again—it’s been too long.

That said, it’s a relief to see someone’s watching out for all those writers—and the shows of solidarity at the awards ceremonies have also been much appreciated. Now maybe we can watch the Oscars.

--Theresa D. Smith

Bookninja points to this little slice of awesome. Zadie Smith was supposed to judge a story contest for the Willesden Herald, the payoff being $5000 for an unpublished author, but she decided not to give anyone the award this year for lack of "greatness," whatever that means. On one hand, I'm thinking, "If I'd've known, I could have won that. I could have." On the other, I'm sure I wouldn't have done any better than those who did submit, so I'm kind of glad not to be one of the poor kids who got told, "You're good, but you're not great." While my sympathies are with the entrants, I am glad to hear someone raising the bar for greatness. Seems like there's always a few mediocre stories that end up in supposedly "great" places--the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Stories, etc. That's a bold move by Zadie Smith.

Bookninja points to this interesting profile of Jeffrey Eugenides. He sounds quite charming.