Book Awards

Well, we haven't quite gotten to the point where Cory Doctorow or Geoff Manaugh gets the invite to Stockholm, but a sidebar to Paul Krugman's Nobel for Economics win today that I haven't seen mentioned is that this may be the first time the big prize has gone to a prominent blogger (who had a very short post--with a very long comments/congratulations thread--about the news this morning). And of course also a sharply opinionated columnist for the New York Times. Who's next: Frank Rich getting a belated Literature nod for his theater criticism, or the Peace Prize committee continuing their recent green turn by tapping Tom Friedman?

With Krugman prominently in the fray for a solution to the current global meltdown (he's been advocating for a partial bank nationalization that the UK's Gordon Brown has just embraced and our own Hank Paulson appears to be moving toward), this award could not have been thrown more directly in the public mix of the moment. Krugman consciously made a move a while back toward public explanation and advocacy for his ideas while keeping up with his front-line academic work, and you can find his recent public manifestos in the bestsellers The Conscience of a Liberal and The Great Unraveling, but if you want to move further along the point-headed spectrum toward the work on trade and globalization that won him the prize, you could turn to two books of lectures for an academic audience (but still written, say the reviews, with his usual clarity), Geography and Trade and Development, Geography, and Economic Theory. And to go even further into the weeds, might I suggest Rethinking International Trade and Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics? And if you want to plunk down a few bills for some macroeconomics homeschooling, there is his standard textbook on the subject, International Economics: Theory and Policy. --Tom

P.S. I just have to point out the top graphic bar the Nobel site uses for their list of previous economics winners (see below) because the three gentlemen pictured (is the guy in the middle Milton Friedman?) look so adorably much like, well, economists. Although I must say most of the econ profs I had in college actually looked a lot more like the bearded Krugman....

P.P.S. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has (of course) a much more authoritative look at Krugman's various books, if you're looking for the first, or the next, place to start reading.

In this week's roundup, we prepare for the worst, go to the movies, and check in with Marlo Thomas:

What books will best prepare kids for our impending financial ruin? Slate's always-great Erica S. Perl has another info-packed slideshow up, this one called "'Mom, What's a Credit Default Swap?' Books to Read Your Children During a Financial Crisis." As Perl observes, "a review of popular American children's books of the past century reveals a recurring theme in the children's publishing industry: When times are tough, cue the stories about times that were even tougher."

She covers books that you've heard of--like Little House on the Prairie, popular in the midst of the Depression (and again, on TV, in the inflationary '70s)--as well as ones you probably haven't, like Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Eudora Welty, for the record, was a big fan of that one. In her autobiography, she admitted that "when she discovered the Peppers in 1918, at age 9, she began daydreaming about being poor." (Found via Fuse #8.)

City of Ember finally in theaters! I read Stephen Holden's harsh review in the NYT of this big-screen adaptation, and I figured I'd pass on the movie. I'm a newcomer to this popular kid series and I liked the books so much that I didn't want to be disappointed. But lo and behold, a lot of reviewers thought it was pretty good (aside from the inexplicable giant mole scenes)! Count me in for a matinee. (Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for the review revue and the blow-by-blow.)

Happy birthday, Free to Be You and Me! The Marlo Thomas classic just turned 35(!) and they've decided to celebrate with a "new, expanded edition." I still love the old-school LP cover (and I can still hear "bald as a ping pong ball" like it was yesterday), but including the likes of Tony diTerlizzi and Peter H. Reynolds sounds pretty promising. (Found via Ypulse Books.)

Boston Globe-Horn Book awards. The Boston Globe-Horn Book awards are now available for your viewing pleasure. Or you can just read about the winners. They were these, FYI:

• Nonfiction: The Wall by Peter Sís
  
• Fiction and Poetry: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney
  
• Picture Book: At Night by Jonathan Bean
  
• Special Citation: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Even better, check out the entertaining ShelfTalker recap, which includes pics of some certain ducklings.

New Notes from the Horn Book. Speaking of the Horn Book, the latest Notes from the Horn Book just came out, and it includes an interview with David Macaulay about The Way We Work: Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body.

Three quick links:

• Don't miss Lauren's post on Mary Ann Hoberman, the new U.S. Children's Poet Laureate.
  
• Check out the official site for Coraline, the Focus Films adaptation of Neil Gaiman's book. (As Monica says, "I’m quite the fan of the book and fussy, but so far this is shaping up to look terrific.")
  
• Don't forget: the deadline is this Wednesday to get your nominations in for the Cybils! Wondering why you should be excited about these blogger awards? Gail Gauthier has three good reasons.
  

The Poetry Foundation has just announced that Mary Ann Hoberman will be the new U.S. Children's Poet Laureate.  The beloved and prolific author of more than 45 children's books, will succeed Jack Prelutsky--the nation's first Children's Poet laureate. The prestigious two-year post comes with a purse of $25,000.   Hoberman, who hails from New England and has lived there all her life, has been writing verses that embody many of the very best qualities of that region's poetic traditions: simplicity, economy, directness, and honesty.  Her poems continue to resonate for young readers even as the country has undergone great cultural changes from the fifties--when Hoberman first began writing--until today.  Like a stalwart New Englander she's remained true to her core approach to children's poetry, never getting thrown off-course by short-lived trends in kids lit.  Some of Hoberman's best known titles include The Llama Who Had No Pajama: 100 Favorite Poems (1998), You Read to Me, I'll Read to You (2004), and A House is a House for Me (1978), for which she won a National Book Award.   But Hoberman isn't one to rest on her laurels, she's got a new book of poetry, All Kinds of Families, coming out in 2009.  --Lauren

The Swedes put their money, all 10 million kroner of it, where their chairman's mouth was, awarding the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio of France. Le Clézio was a bit of an underdog (14/1 odds from the bookies, I believe), and pretty much a complete unknown in the "insular" U.S., but he is a big deal at home: in 1994, according to Time, he was voted the best writer in the French language (although he said he would have voted for Julien Gracq). The Nobel committee called him an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization," and Le Clézio himself, who has led a nomadic life in Africa, Central America, and elsewhere (including Albuquerque these days) after spending much of his childhood in Nigeria, has said

Western culture has become too monolithic. It places the greatest possible emphasis on its urban and technical side, thus preventing the development of other forms of expression — religiosity and feelings, for example. The entire unknowable part of the human being is obscured in the name of rationalism. It is my awareness of this that has pushed me toward other civilizations.

I'll defer to the Literary Saloon for much of the coverage--they are on their game today, having already pulled review quotes all the way back to the 60s for many of his books--but the best piece I've found on him so far is Lev Grossman's in Time. Also see coverage from the New York Times and USA Today, and the Nobelers own bio-bibliography.

It looks like only five of his many works are currently in print in English translations:

• The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilization (1988, trans. 1993) (see the U. of Chicago Press's happy blog post about the prize)
• The Prospector (1985, trans. 1993)
• Onitsha (1991, trans. 1997)
• The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts (1982, trans. 2002)
• Wandering Star (1992, trans. 2004)

We've put together a more complete list of his English translations and French originals on our site. There was an earlier wave of translations in the 60s and 70s, when Le Clézio first became famous, and we have used copies of many of those available (including a copy of his debut, The Interrogation (with its excellent, very French New Wavey cover), going at last check for $575). Hey, is that the author himself on the cover? Based on this equally glamorous Cartier-Bresson photo of the author and his wife (found here), I think it must be:

But it looks like the books most frequently mentioned as his most important haven't made it into English yet. The Nobel committee cites Désert, which "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants," as his "definitive breakthrough as a novelist." And according to USA Today, when the committee chair was asked to recommend a book to start reading Le Clézio with, "he suggested the autobiographical 2003 novel Revolutions," which has been translated into Swedish and German, but not yet into English. --Tom

P.S. This just gives me one more chance to post the greatest author award reaction of all time, Doris Lessing getting the Nobel news last year:

Okay, I'm starting to sound like a WWF announcer (are you ready ruuuuuuumble?) but it is funny that the same Nobel season in which the Swedish chair of the literature prize committee asserted that Americans were not up to European standards saw the first award of the week, for Medicine, go to the French researchers whose claim to discovering the AIDS virus was embroiled in dispute with an American researcher, Robert Gallo, who was not included in today's award. I make no claims to being able to adjudicate the science of the controversy (despite growing up in a National Institutes of Health family, where my dad and Gallo both worked), but it does seem that despite Gallo's "disappointment" at not joining his French colleagues, the controversy (which required at one point an agreement between President Reagan and Prime Minister Chirac) has cooled and the scientific consensus has settled that Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier do have the legitimate claim to first scientific dibs here. Even Anthony Fauci, a high-profile administrator at NIH, "agreed there's no doubt the French scientists first identified the virus. He said they, and zur Hausen [who shared the award for his work on cervical cancer], deserved the Nobel. Fauci said that if additional researchers could have been included, Gallo 'would have been an obvious choice to be added to that list.'"

If you want to return to the bitter days of this '80s scientific controversy (carried on amid the general panic, anger, and shame surrounding the AIDS crisis), NBC's Robert Bazell has a short summary, and you can also visit our contentious customer review section for John Crewdson's Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (whose take on Gallo is obvious from its subtitle). Gallo and Montagnier also wrote their own versions of the discovery and dispute: Gallo in Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery and Montagnier in Virus: The Co-Discoverer of HIV Tracks Its Rampage and Charts the Future. --Tom

Well, in the middle of our biggest blog project yet, what was (by far) our most trafficked and commented-upon post in recent months? Our little squib passing along the instantly notorious quotes from the head of the Nobel literature committee that everyone else was passing along. So here's an update: the literature prize, always given on a Thursday in October, will be announced next week, on October 9. (The other Nobels are always given during a single October week, but the literature committee I guess reserves the right to bicker further and sometimes announces a week or two later.)

This despite one of Herr Engdahl's less-remarked-on quotes in that same article: "Engdahl suggested the announcement date could be a few weeks away, saying 'it could take some time' before the academy settles on a name." Clearly they settled pretty quickly. And maybe Engdahl was blowing a lot of smoke in general (lowering expectations, as they say in the debating game) and plans to go with an American anyway, after softening the blow to his fellow continentals by insulting the rest of the US first. The thought also crossed my mind at the time that he was trying to shift the bookies' line to get some inside money down on Roth or Oates, but clearly the bookies aren't buying: Ladbrokes in the UK have three Americans in their top six favorites (Oates and Roth at 5/1, DeLillo at 7/1), with Pynchon in shouting distance at 14/1. My heart's with Munro or Roth (or the Korean Ko Un), but I'd put my money on Amos Oz.

If you want to follow this tempest further, the Literary Saloon, your first stop for international lit-award news (and international lit news in general, if you're not one of those insular Americans) has a nice roundup. --Tom

In this edition of YA Wednesday, we have one quick announcement because I'm supposed to be on vacation...

Forget Nobel snubbery, this time it's the bloggers' turn to award the literary honors. The 2008 Cybils (3rd annual) will honor the best children's and YA books published during 2008 in the following categories:

YA Fiction
Poetry
Nonfiction Picture Books
Middle Grade Fiction
Nonfiction Middle Grade/YA Books
Graphic Novels
Fiction Picture Books
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Easy Readers

If you have a book blog or just want to add your favorites, check the Cybils blog for rules and lists of 2006 and 2007 winners. You can submit nominations through October 15. (Thanks to Jen Robinson for the heads up.)

We'll be back next week with more from the YA world. Meantime, we *finally* have A.S. King's The Dust of 100 Dogs coming up next on our reading pile, so we're catching up with all the other bloggers who love this book. --Heidi

Looks like you can use those SAS frequent flyer miles for something else, Philip. All award nerds and bored literary columnists can thank Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the literature jury for the Nobel Prize, for stirring things up today with his comments that Americans aren't qualified for the big prize they haven't won since 1993:

Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States.... The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

I had come to understand that no American (especially Roth) was getting the prize until Bush was out of office, but it looks like things may go deeper than that, and we in the provinces (where, admittedly, we could read a little more translated literature) will have to watch from the sidelines while Europe gives itself another one of those gold medals with the picture of the dynamite tycoon on it. David Remnick of the New Yorker gets the best response in the AP article: "And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola." Speaking of insular, it's worth noting that of the eight books by Americans in our editors' top 10 last year, three are by first-generation immigrants and one by the son of immigrants.

Does his contempt extend to Canadians? I've been holding out for Alice Munro for some time now, but it's true that her work shows no influence of the work of Michel Houellebecq, so she may be ineligible. --Tom

In this week's roundup, we contemplate parties in our tummies, visit a new Newbery blog, and get tips on writing:

Yo Gabba Gabba board books. Thanks to some of our Amazon toy bloggers, I found out that Yo Gabba Gabba just started its second season this week! You don't need to have kids in your life to love Yo Gabba Gabba. There hasn't been a cooler kids show since the Morgan Freeman era of The Electric Company--and the second season features everyone from Biz Markie to Amy Sedaris to Hot Hot Heat. If you've never heard of it, watch this now: