And not just a piece of fruit, either. Her book, Half of a Yellow Sun, has won the Orange Prize, and with it, about $60,000 (presumably because of the poetic nature of her prose). From Reuters, via the New York Times (”Nigerian Author Wins Top Women’s Fiction Prize“):

LONDON (Reuters) - Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie landed the Orange Prize on Wednesday, one of the literary world’s top awards given to women writers, for a novel set in the 1960s Biafran civil war.

Orange makes some people see red:

Broadcaster Muriel Gray, who chaired the judging panel for the Orange award, had stirred controversy by complaining that the shortlist emerged from “a lot of dross.”

She said some of the 150 entries for the prize were so bad she could not believe trees had been cut down to publish them.

Too many women, she said, wrote trivial novels inspired by minor domestic problems or crises in their relationships.

But she was fulsome in praise of the winner, saying of Adichie’s novel: “This is a moving and important book by an incredibly exciting author.”

Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Lionel Shriver rank as three of the most prominent past winners of the prize which consistently stokes controversy among literary critics and authors.

The late novelist Kingsley Amis once said he would not care to win it if he were a woman. Female author A.S. Byatt said the prize “ghettoized” women.

Bit of a blogging brownout here — I’ve been buried with software testing and related thrills. But I have dozens of brilliants posts just waiting to burst out. One or two, anyway.

And because I came for the Cormac and didn’t stay for the Bono, I missed Oprah’s newest Book Club pick: Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Read the Booklist review:

In his second novel, the author of The Virgin Suicides (1993) once again proves himself to be a wildly imaginative writer, this time penning a coming-of-age tale, ranging from the 1920s in Asia Minor to the present in Berlin, about a hermaphrodite….

And speaking of Oprah, I just watched her interview of Cormac McCarthy on the TV in Miriam’s, the ALA staff lounge. McCarthy breaks his interview silence for this? Despite a couple of nods to The Road’s portentious tone and apocalyptic theme, Oprah concentrated on more predictable fare: the author’s poverty-stricken early years. Was it true he’d once been thrown out of a 40-dollar-a-month hotel? Was it true that he once was so poor he couldn’t afford a tube of toothpaste? (And my favorite question: he still doesn’t understand women even after being married three times?)

McCarthy gamely (at least, it looked like the McCarthy version of “gamely”: leaning as far away as possible from the lights and cameras but at least smiling) played along, even stating that his life’s goal had not necessarily been to become one of the world’s greatest writers but to avoid having a 9 to 5 job.

And while I was genuinely intrigued to learn that the 73-year-old McCarthy has an 8-year-old son who provided the inspiration for his latest novel, I wanted to crawl under the table when Oprah, inspired, found the perfect peg to hang her interview segment on: The Road, she said, is the “perfect father’s day gift.”

You’ll be able to watch the interview on the Oprah site after 4 p.m. ET.

If McCarthy wanted to break his interview silence, couldn’t he have talked with Charlie Rose? Jon Stewart? Donna Seaman?

In the Chicago Reader’s Spring Books Special, Julia Rickert records her strong suspicion that Rhonda Byrne fabricated a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote in her bestselling book, The Secret (”A Little Secret about The Secret“):

So what? you may be asking. The question came up a lot in discussions of Frey’s dishonesty, and back then the only answer with any weight was that we value truth for truth’s sake. Many readers were inspired by what they believed to be a true story, but it’s hard to show that Frey’s lies did any real damage. But The Secret has potential to cause tangible harm to both believers and bystanders.

For those of us who haven’t read Byrne’s book, reading the article makes it clear that, whether or not the quote is bona fide, Byrne has made a lot of other stuff up. (And given the way she’s prospered from it, no wonder she thinks it’s a cause-and-effect relationship.) My particular favorite is the way she seems to state – by inference, but I don’t know how else you’d interpret it – that the victims of the Holocaust had only themselves to blame.

Her insistence that individuals are solely responsible for the bad things that happen to them is arguably the nastiest part of The Secret, but she doesn’t ignore the likelihood that readers may object to the idea that there are no victims. "Often when people first hear this part of the Secret they recall events in history where masses of lives were lost, and they find it incomprehensible that so many people could have attracted themselves to the event," she writes. "It doesn’t necessarily mean they thought of that exact event, but the frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event."

I wonder if we’ll ever see Byrne sitting in the James Frey Memorial Hot Seat? Not over the Emerson quote, but perhaps after some impressionable lad fails to will himself to fly after leaping off a cliff? I can almost hear the Q&A now….

Oprah: So what, exactly, possessed you to write a book telling people that they could imagine something and it would be true?

Rhonda: Oprah, my method works. The young boy’s problem was that he imagined he could become a bird, which is clearly impossible. Had he imagined that he was a boy who could fly, he would have glided safely to the ground.

From pink-slipped to prizewinner: Charles Rappleye, a former investigative journalist who used his free time after being fired to get going on that book he’d always wanted to write, has won the George Washington Book Prize. From (where else?) the Washington Post (”Biographer Wins Washington Prize for Book on Slave Trade,” by DeNeen L. Brown):

Charles Rappleye, who was once an investigative journalist, has won the third annual $50,000 George Washington Book Prize for his biography “Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution.” It’s the story of John and Moses Brown, brothers who founded Brown University but were dramatically opposed to each other on the business of slavery. It was a system that Rappleye describes in his book as “the most hazardous and the most lucrative business of the time.”

The book, which sheds light on how controversial slavery was in this country long before the Civil War, covers 100 years, from the birth in 1736 of John Brown, a robber baron who ran slave ships from Providence, R.I., to the 1836 death of Moses, the younger brother, who with slave blood on his hands became an abolitionist.

Here’s how he got started:

Rappleye, 51, who lives in Los Angeles, said he began working on the book about three years ago after he lost his job as a journalist at the LA Weekly, where he was an editor and a staff writer. “I was fired by the LA Weekly when a new regime at the paper came in,” he said. “They cleaned house and I went out the door.” He had wanted to write about the Brown brothers for some time and the firing gave him time.

And here’s a link to the Booklist review:

Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution, by Charles Rappleye (Simon & Schuster)

I learned about this from The Biographer’s Craft newsletter, which described the book as “a kind of prosopography.” I learn a new word every day.