A blog about books and literary culture in San Francisco with nary a post about eggs. Go figure.
Two of my favorite artists—and a pair I’d never expected to see in the same headline—got Pulitzered today.
I wonder, over the publication lifespan of The Road, whether the Pulitzer or Oprah’s recommendation will spur more sales.
Here’s the AP article.
Oscar Villalon is the editor of one of the few remaining weekly Sunday book reviews. He’s also a bully thumb wrestler. Here’s his clearheaded take on publisher’s continuing effort to ghettoize fiction:
All this legerdemain over categorizing books implies that there’s something second-rate about writing and reading fiction. It’s one thing if the public believes that, but it’s entirely another when publishers, agents and writers say as much through their actions. They need to acknowledge that’s the lie their “truth” is pushing.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation awards its first ever Saul Bellow Prize to the heavily laureled shoulders of Philip Roth:
The 74-year-old Roth, known for such novels as Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, has won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. He recently became the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner prize, chosen for Everyman, a novel about illness and mortality inspired in part by the death of Bellow, in April 2005.