This morning I saw a graffito on the mailbox by my bus stop that read: ENDER.

Must be an Orson Scott Card fan, I said to myself.

Then I got on the bus. Across from me, a woman was reading Ender’s Shadow.

I probably stared at her too long, but I still couldn’t tell if she was carrying markers.

Lemn Sissay, a judge for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Fiction, informs us that, in the UK at least, some books get longlisted not because of quality but contractual obligation. From the Guardian Blog:

I’ve just finished judging the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Fiction, which had me reading 45 books in three months. When I got talking to novelist Mandy Sayer at a literary festival, she surprised me with an account of how some books get on longlists. Apparently agents can collude with publishers to guarantee, through publishing deals, that certain authors are put forward for specific prizes.

Sissay believes that most contest judges and most authors are unaware of this particular clause. Granted, this only concerns nominations–Sissay isn’t alleging that there’s any pressure to select certain books from the longlist for the shortlist. And if publishers are allowed to submit two books each, then naturally they’re going to factor in commercial considerations–they’re commercial enterprises, after all.

But still, it’s disheartening. You’d like to think that, even in publishing, people would get the most excited about their best work. If a nomination is preordained–theoretically it could happen before the book is even written–that takes a hell of a lot of fun out of the affair.

And if I read 45 books in 3 months to help select a prizewinner, I think it would be pretty irritating to think that some of them weren’t in the pile because of their own merits but because of marketing concerns and the desire to give strokes to major authors.

It would be very interesting to know whether this is also a common practice in the U.S.

Undaunted by the folding of the Sobol Award, Simon & Schuster will be a partner in another new venture, the First Chapters Writing Competition. Announced today (by an “exceptionally excited” Tom Gerace) on Gather.com, a social networking site, the award offers a contract with Simon & Schuster imprint Touchstone, promotion and distribution by Borders, and $5,000 in cash from Gather.com.

The basic idea is that, well, read for yourself:

Round 1: January 11 - April 3, 2007:

The Gather community will vote on the entrants’ first chapters to select 15 of 20 writers to advance to the next stage. The Gather Editorial team will select an additional 5 writers to advance to round 2.

Round 2: April 4 - May 1, 2007:

The 20 remaining novelists will have their second chapters posted on First Chapters where the Gather community and Editorial team will narrow the pool down to 10 semifinalists.

Round 3: May 2 - May 22, 2007:

The third chapters of the 10 semifinalists’ manuscripts will be reviewed and rated by the Gather community and Editorial team and 5 finalists will be selected (4 by Gather members and 1 Editor’s Choice).

Winner Announced: May 31, 2007:

The esteemed judging panel will select one talented novelist as the Grand Prize Winner!

I didn’t see any mention of an entry fee, which is nice, and it’s hard to criticize something that seems so democratic and, well, nice (”put away your query letters and fear of rejection” they declare).

But you knew I’d criticize it, didn’t you?

Several years ago I took part in an online writing competition–it seemed at the time like a fun and easy way to try to win the writing lottery. The whole enterprise quickly devolved into intrigue that makes the Senate of ancient Rome look like a Montessori kindergarten. Writers would slam each other’s work while recruiting friends to praise their own work and take out carefully selected targets. And then, in the same way that high schoolers will exert a truly enormous amount of energy determining who is truly punk and who is merely a poseur, accusations would fly as to whose ratings were in earnest and whose were Machiavellian maneuvering.

I’m sure the people who gather at Gather.com will do no such thing.

Actually, one thing working in this contest’s favor is the fact that people are invited to rate the novels even if they haven’t written one. The contest I referred to above was, if memory serves, populated mostly by writers. If everyone’s competing for the same prize, it’s more like Survivor than a collaborative effort to reward the deserving. So if there are more Gatherers who want to read than write, maybe the contest has a chance to be worthwhile.

Maybe.

From The New York Times:

"It is akin to an ‘American Idol’ for thinking people," snarked Tom Gerace, the chief executive of Gather.com.

Maybe they’re not so nice after all.

I just posted the Top of the List winners to the home page of Booklist Online. I’d hoped to do it even sooner, but we’re still scooping the January 1 & 15 2007 Booklist, which is just going in the mail.

As I noted earlier today in the Book Club, deciding how to cast my votes was extremely difficult. I reviewed at least four outstanding works of literary fiction in 2006 and nominated two of them for Top of the List: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. (I nominated the others for Editors’ Choice.)

The Adult Books editors nominated some tantalizing books, too, but I could only vote for one. Even choosing between my two nominees felt a bit like having a doctor ask which arm I preferred, my right or my left. Ultimately, I voted for The Road. It was thought-provoking, primal, beautiful, ugly, haunting, terrifying, and completely unforgettable. (Brad Hooper called it “Biblical.”) Maybe I was especially drawn to the father-son relationship because I am the father of two young boys. Reading this book late at night, the father’s love for his son–and the impossible choices he confronted–brought tears to my eyes.

The other nominees aren’t likely to be forgotten either, but The Road is utterly timeless and seems likely to be regarded as McCarthy’s masterwork.

I read far less nonfiction and didn’t nominate any nonfiction books for Top of the List. The book I voted for, The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion, by E. O. Wilson, didn’t win (I still think it would have made a nice pair with The Road), but the wisdom of the crowd won out. Just as The Road won by several furlongs, Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East was all alone at the finish.

Helping select an award winner (well, technically there’s no award other than the recognition, but still) is a lot of fun, but also serves as a reminder of how subjective the whole process is. I do think The Road might endure longer than some of the other nominees, but the entire shortlist was so strong that any of them could conceivably have won. Still, we can’t all read every book, and that’s what this whole reviewing business is about–helping people find the best books to read.

While it seems obvious what separates The Road from a book we reject for review, what separates The Road from The Echo Maker can seem almost arbitrary–both are so accomplished that they stand on the same pinnacle of artistry and craftsmanship. But it’s just human nature to sift and weigh and judge, and the extra hype that comes from selecting “bests” isn’t just good for the publishing industry, it’s good for books and literacy in general. So, no matter how arbitrary, subjective, or on-the-money, we take a deep breath and cast our votes.

I’d love to hear others’ opinions about the best books of 2006, both here and in the Book Club. We’ll be posting the full Editors’ Choice list soon–even more fodder for discussion.

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From the Associated Press, via the International Herald Tribune:

Controversial new Sobol Award canceled due to lack of interest

NEW YORK: The Sobol Award, a controversial new literary contest that offered agentless writers a $100,000 (€76,888) first prize and a contract with Simon & Schuster for the top three winners, has been canceled.

The Sobol Award was a for-profit scheme launched by technology entrepreneur Gur Shomron, with the stated goal “to discover talented, unknown fiction writers and help them get the recognition they deserve.”

With an entry fee of $85 and a business plan anticipating as many as 50,000 manuscripts–of which three were to have been published by Simon & Schuster–clearly, the goal was to help as many struggling writers as possible. (While discovering up to $4,250,000 talented, unknown U.S. dollars.)

In the end, only about 1,000 manuscripts were submitted. The entrants have been promised a full refund.

Here’s my favorite part:

Shomron told the AP that he had invested more than $1 million (€770,000) in the prize and that a full-time staff of four would be laid off.

“I’m losing a lot of money,” he said. “But what I’m really sorry about is all the writers who were participating and wanted to be successful.”

Yes, if things had gone according to plan, then he could have gone to bed happy–on a mattress of crisp greenbacks–knowing that he’d helped .006% of the participating writers find success. Huzzah!

What do William Styron, Truman Capote, McGeorge Bundy, Germaine Greer, Gore Vidal, and Michiko Kakutani have in common? They’re on Norman Mailer’s All-Time Enemies List.

Best repartee: after Mailer head-butted him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Vidal–still lying on the floor–said, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”

Does Mailer’s tendency to literally pick fights with his critics mean that Booklist editors should fear swats from his walking canes? Brad Hooper’s review of The Castle in the Forest is, after all, decidedly unenthusiastic. But Brad may have bought insurance by calling The Spooky Art a “goldmine”; judging The Time of Our Time to be in “perfect order”; and deeming The Gospel according to the Son to be “provocatively imagined.”

Hmm, come to think of it, maybe Brad will be riding shotgun with Mailer, cruising around, looking to mix it up with a certain critic from the New York Times….

If your New Year’s resolutions include a plan to be more charitable in 2007, consider the Kigali Public Library:

In 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide in which approximately one million Rwandans were killed. Through the establishment of the Kigali Public Library, Rwanda’s first public library, it is our hope that the tools used for destruction will be replaced with tools of knowledge. Successful completion of this monumental effort will mark a watershed in Rwanda’s history, finally providing unfettered access to a treasure trove of knowledge that has so far been unavailable to a population of over eight million people. The library - a sanctuary for knowledge and a forum for the free exchange of ideas - will also be a monument to serve as a permanent reminder to all Rwandans and the rest of the world that the atrocities committed in 1994 will never be forgotten.

When I reviewed Ken Bruen’s The Guards way back in 2002–it was the first book of his that I’d read–I wrote that the protagonist, Jack Taylor, was “a bit self-congratulatorily, well, Irish.”

(I wasn’t sure at the time whether “congratulatorily” was an actual word, but it made it past the copyeditor, so I’m sticking with it now.)

I’m two-thirds of the way through Bruen’s latest, Priest, and I have to say that this is the Irish crime novelist’s most Irish novel yet.

Some examples:

My holdall held trousers, one shirt and rosary beads. The Irish survival kit. (p.10)

You will never, and I mean never, catch an Irish person walking under a ladder or not crossing their fingers during a hurling match. (p.14)

Irish women, nine ways to Sunday, they’ll bust your balls. (p.17)

As is usual for Irish pubs, sentries sat at the counter — men in their sixties with worn caps, worn eyes, nursing half-empty pints. (p.18)

Ireland is a land of questions and very, very few answers. (p.19)

Other nations reach for weapons, we reach for relics. (p.25)

And as the saying goes in Ireland, they knew all belonging to you. (p.32)

He fell into step beside me, muttered the Irish benediction, “Sorry for your trouble.” (p.40)

In Ireland, no reply is taken for agreement. (p.41)

The ultimate Irish accolade, bestowed rarely. (p.42)

It had to rain, it was Ireland, our birthright. (p.42)

In Ireland, possibly the greatest sin is to have ideas above your station. (p.46)

In Ireland, we had our own weapon of mass destruction. Alcoholism. (p.47)

She released me, uttered the closest thing to an Irish benediction. “Let me have a look at you.” (p.50)

And that’s just the first fifty pages. Looking at them all together, the effect is almost exhausting. Now, it might seem odd to criticize an Irish writer for writing about the Irish national character, but I’m not taking issue with anything he says. He’s certainly qualified to comment on it and I’m not, so I take all his observations as gospel truth.

It’s just that I keep wondering why he feels compelled to write about it so relentlessly. His novels are published in Great Britain before they’re published in the United States, but it doesn’t feel as if he’s writing for Irish readers. (An equivalent might be for a U.S. writer to keep adding asides like, “In the U.S., we pepper our speech with the word ‘like’” or “As we bumped fists, he intoned the American benediction, ‘I hear that, dude.’”)

So maybe he’s really writing for U.S. audiences. U.S. audiences are notorious for lapping up the Irish lilt. I saw Bruen on a panel at Bouchercon in Chicago and–let me preface this by saying that he truly did seem like the world’s nicest guy–he would footnote his wry asides by saying, “But I’m Irish, what do I know?” The crowd loved it.

So he’s playing the Celtic card. Fair enough, it’s his right. Maybe I’m envious. In the U.S., it’s impossible to make many accurate generalizations about our national character–we’re just too spread-out and culturally diverse. Maybe, deep in my heart, I wish I came from a small country where shared character traits made it possible for me to talk about my fellow citizens as if we were all members of one big dysfunctional family. Maybe I wish my country was seen less as a greedy, planet-eating mob of yokels and more as a tribe of affable, village-dwelling storytellers. It’s possible.

(Of course, the Irish-American relationship is a complicated one: why do so many Irish people live in the U.S. while so many Americans are desperate to return to the auld sod?)

But, reading the book, the references feel relentless. Granted, part of Bruen’s project–besides taking Jack Taylor on another slog through a long, dark night of the soul–is to examine the New Ireland, the Celtic Tiger. When the book starts, Taylor has just spent five months in the loony bin and when he emerges, it’s to an even newer New Ireland than he’s been grousing about for the past bunch of books.

If I’d known then where this initial resolution would take me–into the heart of the Irish soul–would I have turned away? (p.31)

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been a bit too hard on Bruen in my past reviews. A lot of reviewers rave about him, and while I always find his books worth reading, I usually close them with a nagging sense of having been let down. One complaint is that his spare style rarely leaves me with indelible images. (And not that indelible images require flowery prose, as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road proves.)

I think it’s more that Bruen doesn’t push himself hard enough. He has great talent as a crime writer, and he’s undeniably a fresh, unique voice in the field. But each book capably delivers more or less what the previous one did. And for all the darkness that the tales can offer–at the end of The Dramatist, Taylor’s botched babysitting results in the death of his best friends’ beloved child–there’s an amiability that creeps through and keeps me from buying the low moments. It feels like a story told in a comfortable pub, and I keep waiting for Bruen to neutralize the tragedy by chuckling, “But I’m Irish, so what do I know?”

Mostly I read, but sometimes I do a little writing, too. From the Chicago Reader Fiction Issue:

The Courage of My Companions
By Keir Graff
December 29, 2006

MY NAME LOBSANG Sherpa. I am Sherpa. Carry big load up mountain. Climb Sagarmatha, mountain you call Everest, seven time. My English not so good. OK to speak Sherpa, you make into English?

THAT’S BETTER. I can speak enough English to make myself understood on the mountain - I know the words for crampon, altitude sickness, and Gamow bag, which is a device that simulates the air pressure of lower altitudes - but for a story like this, I’ll need to employ a greater degree of nuance. And my English is - how do you say? - inelegant.

…

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From Galleycat:

Last Sunday, Judy Stoffman of the Toronto Star updates a story we first heard back in June, with more information about Alice Munro’s announcement that she’s all done now. And Stoffman thinks she might actually mean it this time when she says “she has used up all her material and has nothing left to say,” too, although other observers who have heard similar protests of retirement aren’t so sure. Still, Munro told one reporter she’s only got four unpublished stories left in the can, and she’s even said to have told fans at a signing she wasn’t going to write anymore.

My first thought on reading this was that Brad Hooper, Booklist’s Adult Books Editor, would be devastated–he likes Munro so much that he’s writing a book about her work. But then I reread his mixed review of The View from Castle Rock and I wondered if he might not agree that it’s best for a writer to quit near the peak of her powers.

(I imagine he might approach the book a bit differently, too, if he believes she really is done.)

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