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The winners of the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize have been announced: Overall My War: Killing Time in Iraq, by Colby Buzzell (Berkeley/Penguin) Fiction The Doorbells of Florence, by Andrew Losowsky (Prandial Publishing/Lulu) Comics Mom’s Cancer, by Brian Fies (Abrams) More details at the official contest blog.

As the dust settles in the newspapers-versus-blogs punchup, the L.A. Times (“Battle of the book reviews,” by Josh Getlin) explores the common ground: The accusations flew back and forth. But now there is a growing sense that enough is enough – and that the friction between old and new book media obscures the fact that the two are [...]

Lucille Clifton has won the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The Poetry Foundation site has some good links — actual poems and an interview, too. For those who don’t follow the glitzy poetry scene, the Ruth Lilly “honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.” Furthermore: Established in 1986 and presented annually [...]

A nice way to take a quick break without leaving your desk: The Cover Art Gallery (found via Edward Champion and Kitabkhana): I love books. I love the smell of ‘em, the feel of ‘em, and I love the look of ‘em. In fact, I even like to read them, but that’s another story. The main preoccupation [...]

I’ve been deep in the data lately, having a hard time feeling creative enough to do much writing. Which is an inadvertent but completely appropriate lead-in to what I logged on to write about. I recently finished reading Robert Walser’s The Assistant, in what may or may not be the first English translation. And while I enjoyed it, [...]

Hooray! The Quills will be returning for a third year, reports Publishers Weekly (“Revamped Quills Set for October 22“). There will be some changes, however. First, instead of letting anyone with an Internet connection cast a vote, 6,000 booksellers and librarians will do the honors. Second, the books they’ll be voting on (5 books times 19 [...]

Thinking more about the whole truth-in-memoir conundrum, I’ve come up with the following idea: if a book is called a memoir, let’s assume that, like memory, it’s not to be trusted. Enjoyed, possibly, but not viewed as documentary evidence. If an author is writing in the first-person and they do want us to trust the [...]

Now even the New York Times (“Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?” by Motoko Rich) is writing about the decline of book reviews in newspapers: To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers – not surprisingly – see it [...]

It’s been practically weeks without news about a memoirist’s faulty memory, so you can imagine my relief upon learning that some women are challenging the veracity of Deborah Rodriguez’ Kabul Beauty School (“Shades of Truth: An Account of a Kabul School Is Challenged,” by Abby Ellin, New York Times): But Crazy Deb has raised the ire of six women [...]