Last night, at an event held at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan, the National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists in six categories — autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry — for the 2011 publishing year. The NBCC Awards are singular in that they are the only awards chosen by the critics themselves, seeking every year to “honor the best literature published in English” as well as to “foster a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.” The winners will be announced at a ceremony on March 8th, 2012, but for now, click through to see the nominees and let us know which ones you’re rooting for — or whether you think they completely missed the mark.
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There’s no polite way to say it. The star of Roberto Bolaño’s long-awaited novel, The Third Reich, is a geek — a gamer geek, to be precise. And it’s the real-world implications of his all-consuming pastime that underlie the book’s action, even as he relaxes on the beach with his beautiful girlfriend and parties into the night with new friends. The immense role gaming plays in Bolaño’s atmospheric, slow-burning novel, written before The Savage Detectives and 2666 and serialized by The Paris Review in advance of its publication last month, got us thinking about the many memorable geeks contemporary literature has given us. A selection of our favorites is after the jump; add yours in the comments. Read More »
“I’d have taken a much worse evaluation from [James] Wood than I got, if it had seemed precise and upstanding,” writes Jonathan Lethem in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “I wanted to learn something about my work. Instead I learned about Wood. The letdown startled me.” Although Lethem’s piece is new, the review in question was published in 2003. The New Yorker critic, then at The New Republic, wrote a mixed but occasionally nasty review of The Fortress of Solitude. So, why has he chosen to hit back now, after having already exchanged private notes about the piece with Wood?
Apparently, Lethem is still thinking about the review in 2011. He had great hopes for Wood’s read on his novel, but the critic’s failure to even mention The Fortress of Solitude‘s element of magical realism struck him as a dishonest attempt to sidestep an important formal issue in favor of continuing his ongoing critique of contemporary American “realism.” Lethem’s eventual point is that Wood has a certain agenda that pushes some of his writing into the realm of “bad faith”: pretentiousness. “Earlier,” he writes, “I’d been content to sustain a cloudy image of a persuasive new critic who made people excited and nervous by passionately attacking novels that people (including myself) passionately believed in; now I found myself content to revise that in favor of an impression of a unpersuasive critic whose air of erudite amplitude veiled — barely — a punitive parochialism.” In the same paragraph, he notes, “When Wood praises, he mentions a writer’s higher education, and their overt high-literary influences, a lot.”
So, who (if anyone) comes out ahead? Is Lethem’s essay just sour grapes, aged to the vintage of a mid-priced wine? Or is he saying something valuable about the way even our best critics let their own agendas poison their reviews? [via GalleyCat]
It’s the first of the month, and you know what that means: a brand new spate of new literary releases to delve into. Not that we mind — the weather’s getting brisker (not to mention those snowstorms, NYC), and we really can’t think of anything better to do than to curl up with a cup of hot cider and a great novel (or memoir, or book of essays, or short story collection). Don’t be put off by the number of big names on our list this month — we like a struggling first novel as much as the next blog, but November is the month for publishers to pull out their big guns, and boy have they ever. Click through to see our list of ten must-reads coming out this month, and let us know which books you’re most psyched to dig into in the comments.
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This week marked the release of Literary Brooklyn by Evan Hughes, a new chronicle of the borough’s literary history and author residents, which is getting some serious buzz. We’re excited to read it, but to tide ourselves over we thought we’d continue our literary love letters series with a collections of odes to the “rougher” side of the river. We’ve pulled from fiction and essays by residents and non-residents, but Brooklyn lovers all. Add your own favorite passages about Brooklyn in the comments, or feel free to make up your own odes to our fair city. How many words rhyme with ‘hipster?’
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Today at Flavorpill, we wondered if you’d even be able to smell this steak scent-emitting billboard if it was in Times Square. We crushed on NPR a little harder after watching this video that they made for D8. We got to see what Google Creative Labs’ Ed Kim wears to work each day, thanks to the self-illustrations on his Tumblr blog. We wished that these redesigned license plates would become a reality — especially New York’s. We found a bicycle seat cover that will ensure that your ride never gets stolen again. We wanted to crawl inside of this giant R2D2 and take a look around. We were happy to hear that the geeky Star Wars kid is now a slightly less geeky law school student. We made plans to visit all six of the world’s best-looking bookstores. We couldn’t wait to read Jonathan Lethem’s upcoming book about John Carpenter’s They Live, which is part of a new series from Soft Skull. And finally, we wished that we could see “the numerous costume changes” in Weird Al’s first-ever European show at ATP later this year. We’re sure his performance will be almost as epic as the #weirdalgoneindie hashtag game that the news inspired.
1. MGMT‘s upcoming sophomore release, Congratulations, which isn’t due out until April 13, leaked over the weekend. As a result, the band is now streaming it here. [via Vulture]
2. Rumor is that Parks and Recreation‘s Aziz Ansari is in final talks to host the 2010 MTV Movie Awards. [via EW]
3. When Showtime’s Nurse Jackie returns for a second season this month, Dr. Cooper will be tweeting in character and in real time from @DoctorCoop. [via NYT]
4. A new Joyce Carol Oates short story from the latest issue of the New Yorker is online for your reading pleasure.
5. Did you see Michelle Obama‘s cameo on last night’s episode of The Simpsons? The character was voiced by none other than Angela Bassett. (video) [via HuffPo]
Bonus link: An interview with Jonathan Lethem‘s Second Life avatar
Earlier in March, word of the literary archives of the late David Foster Wallace landing at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin caused considerable fanfare, for understandable reasons. Now fans and scholars — not to mention biographers — would have a chance to delve inside the working mind of the author of Infinite Jest (who committed suicide at the age of 46 in 2008) and pore over notes, an eclectic book collection, letters to and from noted literary colleagues like Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen, and course syllabi for the many classes Wallace taught over a decade and a half, most recently as a tenured (and highly-regarded) professor of English Literature at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
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The Millions recently posted the very Shteyngart-y opening passage of Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming novel, Super Sad True Love Story
.
“Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off.”
It got us thinking about our own favorite beginnings, both recent and classic. Below are some favorites from our bookshelf. Feel free to add your own picks in the comments section.
1. Slumberland
by Paul Beatty
Best commentary on “post-blackness” considering Obama wasn’t even president when the book was written:
“You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so.”
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As The Millions noted in its 2010 book preview, the theme for the upcoming year (and beyond) seems to be posthumous publication: Roberto Bolaño, Ralph Ellison, Stieg Larsson, and David Foster Wallace — the dead gang’s all here! (OK, so technically DFW’s The Pale King isn’t meant to come out until 2011, but we couldn’t leave him out.) That said, there’s plenty of good stuff to look forward to from the living as well. After the jump, we reveal the books that we’re most excited about reading in the coming months — and tell you about a few that we’ve already devoured.
Be sure to leave your own suggestions in the comments.
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