The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been awarded (”Los Angeles Times Book Prizes awarded,” by Josh Getlin, Los Angeles Times). (I wrote it that way on purpose and it’s even more redundant than I ever dreamed.) And, yes, they do things differently on the Left Coast:

Fiction

A Woman in Jerusalem, by A. B. Yehoshua, translated by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt)

Biography

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler (Knopf) 

History

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Current Interest

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, by Ian Buruma (Penguin)

Mystery/Thriller

Echo Park, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

White Ghost Girls, by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)

Young Adult Fiction

Tyrell, by Coe Booth (Push/Scholastic)

Science and Technology

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, by Eric R. Kandel (Norton)

Poetry

Ooga-Booga, by Frederick Seidel (Farrar) 

Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement

William Kittredge

Aside from The Looming Tower and Echo Park, I wouldn’t say there’s an obvious or expected pick in the bunch (what, they didn’t read The Road?). But good for them for not dreaming up some reason to honor Philip Roth.

The winners of the 2007 Edgar Awards have been announced. Not only that, statuettes have been given to the winners.

Best Novel

The Janissary Tree, by Jason Goodwin (Farrar)

Best First Novel by an American Author

The Faithful Spy, by Alex Berenson (Random)

Best Paperback Original

Snakeskin Shamisen, by Naomi Hirahara (Bantam/Delta)

Best Fact Crime

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, by James L. Swanson (Morrow)

Best Critical/Biographical

The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, by E. J. Wagner (Wiley)

Best Short Story

“The Home Front,” from Death Do Us Part, by Charles Ardai (Little, Brown)

Best Juvenile

Room One: A Mystery or Two, by Andrew Clements (Simon & Schuster)

Best Young Adult

Buried, by Robin Merrow MacCready (Dutton)

Best Play

Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure, by Steven Dietz (Arizona Theatre Company)

Best Television Episode Teleplay

Life on Mars, Episode 1, by Matthew Graham (BBC America)

Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay

The Wire, Season 4, by Ed Burns, Kia Corthron, Dennis Lehane, David Mills, Eric Overmyer, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon & William F. Zorzi (Home Box Office)

Best Motion Picture Screenplay

The Departed, by William Monahan (Warner Bros.)

And Stephen King, natch, was inducted as a Grand Master. Publishers Weekly (”Edgar Salutes the King,” by Dick Donahue) has the, ahem, “deets.”

My only quibble? I was rooting for Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights in the Paperback Original category. But, ahem, “anywho,” wish I’d been there.

More details from the Chicago Tribune in the case of the student who was arrested for doing his homework (”Student’s writing brings disorderly conduct charge,” by Jeff Long). Specifically, details of the assignment, which was called “Free Writing”:

“Write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing.”

Now, upon reading the carefully culled passages — chosen, I’m sure, for maximum shock value — there are those who will argue that, in school, “free” doesn’t really mean “whatever the hell you want,” that a student still needs to use good judgment. I don’t dispute that at all. The remarks show someone who’s either exceedingly immature or genuinely disturbed:

Carroll said the complaint against Lee quotes his essay as saying: “Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s … t … a … b …, puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.”

I don’t know the author, but I’m going to go with “exceedingly immature.” I’m not really shocked. In fact, I can still remember how much fun I thought it was to shock adults when I was in high school–that’s what this feels like.

I can see why this would prompt a call to the student’s parents. I can see why a visit to the school counselor would be in order. Those are first steps in a logical sequence of events. Calling the cops shows a startling lack of imagination on the part of the adults.

Now, all that said: don’t tell a teenager to write whatever the hell they want if you’re not prepared to read it.

I’m certainly proud to live in a country where we don’t compound tragedy with hysteria. This morning’s Chicago Tribune (”Massacre fallout: Charges for essay,” by Jeff Long and Carolyn Starks) reports that a high school student in Cary, Illinois was arrested — arrested! — and charged with disorderly conduct for writing an essay that disturbed his teacher. The assignment? Communicate ideas and emotions for a creative-writing class. The essay itself wasn’t released, so we don’t know what it says (we’re all of course imagining that it depicts a Virginia Tech-like scenario). But the Trib paraphrases police as saying it was “violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.”

I thought the lesson of Virginia Tech was that we should not ignore warning signs of violent behavior and that we should seek help for troubled students. I’m sure that being arrested and having his picture splashed across front pages nationwide will help this young man with his anger problem, if indeed he has one.

Furthermore, I thought that personal expression, whether assigned as homework or extracurricular, was protected in this country unless it contains specific threats to people or property.

But that’s a class that the police and school adminstrators must have cut. According to Community High School District 155 Supt. Jill Hawk:

“Our staff is very familiar with adolescent behavior,” she said. “We’re very well-versed with types of creativity put into writing. We know the standards of adolescent behavior that are acceptable and that there is a range.”

In other words, don’t worry about what the rules are specifically — we’ll tell you when you’ve broken them.

The Virginia Tech massacre was heartbreaking, but treating a possibly troubled student as if he’s already committed a crime only increases the odds that it will happen again. The young man’s father said he wasn’t contacted by anyone — until the police told him his son had been arrested.

Couldn’t this have at least started with a parent-teacher conference?

An unforgivable delay, I know, but the days have been so full of Cormac McCarthy winning awards that one forgets which ones one has recorded and which ones one has not. But: by a score of 15 to 2, the winner of the 2007 Tournament of Books is…*drumroll*…yes, I know it’s inevitable…ladies and gentlemen…please give it up for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road!

After months of resounding and high-flown praise for The Road (my own included), this annotated vote makes the Tournament of Books my new favorite book contest.

DAN CHAON: I’ll go for The Road, at least in part because it includes some excellent recipes.

David Halberstam’s untimely death won’t be news to anyone today, but it took me until today to sift through some of the obituaries and tributes. The legacy of his Vietnam reporting is, of course, far-reaching, and his books, on an impressively wide range of subjects, have informed and inspired many readers. I was struck by this quote, requoted in the New York Times obit (”David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies,” by Clyde Haberman):

"A writer should be like a playwright - putting people on stage, putting ideas on stage, making the reader become the audience," he recently told an interviewer for NY1 News.

The same piece seems to suggest that the popularity of the phrase “best and the brightest” originated with Halberstam’s book of the same title. A minor point, perhaps, but anyone who can put a string of words into lasting circulation has certainly affected the public’s psyche. An Associated Press article (”Best & Brightest: Former Colleagues Pay Tribute to Halberstam“) collects quotes from his friends and colleagues, themselves heavyweights, further testament to his influence.

Here are links to the reviews of Halberstam’s books in Booklist Online (bear in mind that the BOL archive only goes back to 1992):

The Education of a Coach (2005)

The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship (2003)

Firehouse (2002)

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (2001)

Playing for Keeps (1999)

The Children (1998)

The Fifties (1993)

It’s a tool to be used judiciously, but I’ve always appreciated reviews written in the same style as the work under review. (I’ve done it twice myself, with Tom Paine’s The Pearl of Kuwait and James Ellroy’s Destination! Morgue.) And now, in the Guardian, John Crace does it — well, it’s theoretically a “digested read,” but it’s really a review — with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin:

“Forsooth,” he swore. “Henceforth shall I remain a derivative Wagnerian hero and wander mindlessly through the realms of Middle-Earth on a quasi-symbolic quest and, Children of the Eldar, resolve only to talk in sentences of unspeakable leadenness, punctuated by manifold parentheses.”

As “newspapers have begun to forsake books and their readers,” The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviews:

And we’re getting tired of it. We’re tired of watching individual voices from local communities passed over for wire copy. We’re tired of book editors with decades of experience shown the exit. We’re tired of shrinking reviews. We’re tired of hearing newspapers fret and worry over the future of print while they dismantle the section of the paper which deals most closely with the two things which have kept them alive since the dawn of printing presses: the public’s hunger for knowledge and the written word.

They’re launching a new series about it on their blog, Critical Mass, and they offer tips on how you can get involved in saving book reviews (mainly, sign their petition, write a letter to your local paper, join the NBCC if you’re eligible).

Edward Champion, freelance book reviewer, NBCC member, and litblogger, offers another point of view:

One can complain until one is blue in the face about "saving" book reviewing. But let’s be clear in our terminology here. "Saving" implies that book reviewing is some gray whale about to become extinct. But what we are seeing here is an evolution and a convergence point, not an extinction.

NBCC president John Freeman has also overlooked a key ally, suggests Champion:

What I am suggesting is something far more ambitious than John Freeman: a united front, whereby literary and "sub-literary" enthusiasts of all stripes, print and online, litblogger and journalist, campaign on behalf of literary coverage in as many conduits as possible.

Champion has a point, which is that we’ll get more done if we can unite more BookPeople (TM) (hey, if “litblogger” is a term of art, then I’m trademarking BookPeople (TM)) in the common cause. However, there are natural reasons that BookPeople (TM) who write for pay in print publications are reluctant to enlist those who, often for free, write primarily for online publication.

(To some extent, both arguments make me picture Monty Python’s People’s Front of Judea, where we argue about semantics while the Romans are tromping up the stairs. One feels so very small compared to corporate machinery and societal indifference.)

But there’s a second point to Champion’s point, which is that we need to consider all conduits. I want nothing more than to open my newspaper and find a book section that’s bursting with reviews, essays, and news — all of it written by brilliant, local BookPeople (TM) who were paid at least one dollar per word. But that’s not going to happen. Petitions and letter-writing campaigns won’t have any effect if the lifeblood of newspapers — advertising — doesn’t flow.

Newspapers are in the middle of a long, slow decline, and as they begin to contemplate their own mortality, the cares of the BookPeople (TM) are far from their minds. Book publishers have found what they believe are more effective ways of promoting their wares than by purchasing print ads. Arts coverage may be essential to the health of the community, but it has always existed because it either made money or at least didn’t cost too much. And, now that we live in the age not of the patron, but of the corporation, newspapers don’t even really have a conscience to appeal to.

I’m depressed.

But there’s hope. The litblogosphere is already full of BookPeople (TM), both paid and unpaid, who are doing a terrific job of helping books find readers and vice versa. And while things are progressing more slowly than once predicted, it has been proven that you can make money on the web. With no less than the publisher of the New York Times speculating that his paper’s future is online-only, there is hope for the professional book critic. Once papers don’t have to pay for printing and distribution — and if online advertising and subscriptions pick up — something similar to the old model may reemerge alongside the new model. We could have critics publishing for pay and for free, pursuing the work that sustains them alongside the work that excites them. (Ideally those would be the same thing, but anyone who’s been asked to review a James Patterson novel would probably tell you that it doesn’t always work that way.) And the reviews might get longer again, too.

Or it may not happen that way. Who knows?

Don’t get me wrong: I do absolutely support the efforts of those who want to fight the cuts in newspaper book reviews, and I’ll cheer their successes. But all communication is evolving because of the Web’s influence, and book reviewing is not exempt. It may be wise to consider Champion’s admonition:

And while it’s certainly egregious to see serious literary criticism passed over for fluff, perhaps the current roster of book critics don’t provide, dare I say it, an accessible or entertaining entry point, or even an inclusive range, into thoughtful criticism.

There’s always room to improve our own work. And if readers feel our reviews are indispensible, it will be difficult for any kind of publisher to part with them.

So, only 11 years later, Granta will publish its second “Best of Young American Novelists” issue. Despite claims that the list carries a lot less weight now than it did (”The novel has become like landscape painting,” sniffs an editor at FSG), there’s bound to be plenty of talk about what the composition of the list “means”–other than the fact that it’s a list of really good writers who might have some books you want to read. And here they are:

Daniel Alarcon
Kevin Brockmeier
Judy Budnitz
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray

The Guardian (”Once upon a time in America…” by Ed Pilkington) profiles a half-dozen of the above, while in the Los Angeles Times (”In these new American stories, the world speaks“) Scott Timberg gets a pretty good tennis match going, asking “Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days?”

“All of us agreed on one thing,” Ian Jack, the magazine’s editor wrote in the issue’s introduction. “Ethnicity, migration and ‘abroad’ had replaced social class as a source of tension…. “

A teammate, who coincidentally shares an office with Gabe Hudson, one of the listed, concurs:

Novelist Edmund White, one of the judges, referred in his notes on the list to “what might be called the Peace Corps novel, written about the encounter of the young, privileged American with the developing world.”

Laura Miller thinks the new trend isn’t as significant as it sounds:

“Writing about immigrants saves you from having to write about mass culture,” a topic literary writers, young or white or ethnic or otherwise, generally fear.

And Meghan O’Rourke thinks that, in focusing on multiculturalism instead of class experience, young novelists are missing the story:

O’Rourke, for instance, noted that the U.S. is increasingly economically polarized, but the young writers she read didn’t seem particularly interested.

But Jack points out a perfectly logical reason that this is so:

“To go through this process of creative writing schools, now, to become a budding novelist, more and more means you need a certain amount of ancestral wealth. I hate to sound like a Marxist, but economics does govern a lot of life, especially cultural life.”

Not that you can generalize too much about the work of 21 talented young writers, but still. Way back up at the top of his article, Timberg parenthetically points out a class and cultural divide that certainly deserves an article of its own:

(Some things seem never to change, though: More than half of the chosen writers live in New York City, and the only Southland writer is Maile Meloy, who lives in Los Angeles.)

A move to New York City has certainly improved the quality of many writers’ work. Or, failing that, the visibility.

The winners of the 2007 Bancroft Awards, said by the givers to be “one of the most coveted honors in the field of history,” have been announced:

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert D. Richardson (Houghton)

Mockingbird Song, by Jack Temple Kirby (Univ. of North Carolina)

Because these are not works of poetry, the cash prize is only $10,000 for each winner. It’s a good thing that researching, interpreting, and writing about historical events takes so little time!