Book lovers may well imagine that the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest literary marketplace, is a kind of nirvana–commercial, sure, but nonetheless a jaw-dropping testament to the continuing relevance of books and writers.

Those book lovers have not yet read Carole Cadwalladr’s lively, sobering report on this year’s fair (”‘It’s carnage…’ Inside the genteel world of books,’” Observer):

But then there’s nothing like going to Frankfurt to make you think that publishing is only very peripherally about writers, anyway. They’re simply the manufacturers of the ‘product’, and wandering around Frankfurt’s eight vast ‘halls’ - spaces which would comfortably accommodate a fleet of 747s and have enough room left over for a couple of municipal libraries in the corner - is a salutary lesson in just how many other manufacturers of product there are, and just how much product.

And if that doesn’t tell you what you’re in for, here’s another sample: 

Oh, the writers. What becomes abundantly clear from Frankfurt is that if you’ve got a book inside, it’s really not a bad idea to keep it there. Why does anybody even want to be a writer? And I say that as one.

And another:

‘No writer should ever go to Frankfurt. It’s soul-destroying. You see writers being traded like pork bellies.’

And another:

‘You look around and you think the world needs another book like it needs a hole in the head.’

It’s Friday. Knock off early and head to the arcade. (Thanks, Carlos!)

This is either the most romantic thing I’ve read all year, or the most depressing–actually, it’s both (”Love letter that sealed a death pact,” by Graham Tearse, Guardian):

An open letter of love and despair written by renowned French philosopher André Gorz to his British-born wife, Doreen, has become an overnight bestseller in France after the couple were found dead in their home east of Paris.

Here’s where you’ll need the hankie:

‘Sometimes, at night, I see the silhouette of a man walking behind a hearse along an empty road in a deserted landscape,’ wrote Gorz. ‘I am that man. I don’t want to attend your cremation, I don’t want to receive your ashes in a bowl.’

Film critic writes book, cries, finds happy ending, offers advice: write in Starbucks. I’m being glib. Partly. From the Star-Telegram (”S-T film critic’s book-publishing adventure,” by Christopher Kelly):

That was when I realized that if you truly value your mental health, fiction writing is not the wisest way to spend your spare time.

Perhaps you’ve heard about this already, but if you haven’t, I think you’ll be interested. I saw this in Publishers Weekly (”Live from Frankfurt,” by Karen Holt) first, but New York (”Dave Eggers’s Next Novel Is Based on ‘Where the Wild Things Are’?“) included pretty pictures:

Publishers Weekly reports that the Frankfurt Book Fair is abuzz with talk about Dave Eggers’s new novel, which apparently quietly sold to Ecco last winter. Ecco, the small, super-literary imprint at Harper, doesn’t usually brag about sales potential, usually because most of its books don’t have a lot of sales potential. According to PW, though, Ecco chief Dan Halpern is telling everyone at the fair that the book - an adult novel based on Where the Wild Things Are, scheduled to be published in 2008 to coincide with Spike Jonze’s movie, for which Eggers co-wrote the screenplay - will be a monster hit, if you’ll pardon the expression.

I can see why they think it has sales potential. I can also imagine a marketing meeting where someone riffs that the book will appeal to kids and adults, or the kid in everyone, or adults because they used to be kids, or kids through adults and everyone in between….

It probably won’t sell well to the anti-monster crowd, but what do those people like?

Wow! Those crazy Swedes have made some surprising picks in the past (Elfriede Jelinek, anyone?), but this time they picked someone–Doris Lessing–that Ladbrokes hadn’t even bothered to give odds on. They even had Bob Dylan, for crying out loud. (At 150-1, I was sure I’d be retired by now–so long, kids’ college fund!) However, unlike some picks, Lessing is someone you can sort of see winning the thing.

Some, of course, beg to differ (”Lessing wins Nobel literature prize,” by Matt Moore and Karl Ritter, AP):

However, American literary critic Harold Bloom called the academy’s decision “pure political correctness.”

“Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable … fourth-rate science fiction,” Bloom told The Associated Press.

Words of wisdom? You bet:

“When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s,” she told the AP in an interview a year ago. “What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire - nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?”

Be sure to read Donna Seaman’s review of the winner’s most recent work, The Cleft (2007).

Talk about surprised expectations, Hermione Lee’s (Edith Wharton) prologue to her conversation with Philip Roth (Exit Ghost) closes with a surprising paragraph (the interview is from the New Yorker [”Age Makes a Difference“] but the introduction is only in the Observer [”An audience with Philip Roth“]):

On our last evening. Philip takes me to an Italian restaurant he likes in the far West Forties, way outside any fashionable or literary neighbourhoods. (’You won’t see Joan Didion here,’ he says.) It’s a family business, full of big, tough, snazzily dressed Italian couples, quiet family groups and the chef’s relations. Philip is greeted as an old friend. Work’s over, and he settles down to have fun: anecdotes, character-sketches, jokes, songs, impersonations, come pouring out. It’s not like being at Versailles with the Sun King any more. It’s like having supper with the Marx Brothers; it’s like tuning into your very own radio channel, the Roth Station. The volume goes up as the comedy gets more outrageous, and heads turn - not in recognition, here, but because people nearby are being distracted from their own conversations. One old man, out for a quiet evening with his wife, says wrily to Roth as they leave, passing our table: ‘Try and enjoy yourself.’

The National Book Award Finalists have been announced. Surprises? Take your pick.

Fiction

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar)
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis (Farrar)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown)
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard (Knopf)

Nonfiction

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Hachette/Twelve)
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Farrar/Hill and Wang)
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad (Knopf)
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Poetry

Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson (Houghton)
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (HarperCollins/Ecco)
The House on Boulevard St., by David Kirby (Louisiana State Univ.)
Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly (Norton)
Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (Norton)

Young People’s Literature

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown)
Skin Hunger, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Atheneum)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic)
Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown)

F.O.B. (Friend of Booklist) Kaite Mediatore Stover has a new blog up and running–this one’s for her workplace, Kansas City Public Library. It’s called The Big Read, meaning that classic film aficianados and punsters still have “The Big Read One” available to them. Sorry.

This fall’s Big Read is Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. (Which also has some punning opportunities for the literally minded–it is a war novel, after all.) Did you know that “Ernie” (as he insisted we call him) wrote for the Kansas City Star? I did not ( even though I was on a first-name basis with him).

"Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

The simplest writing advice ever given to a young writer led to some of the greatest contributions to American Literature. Ernest Hemingway’s time at The Kansas City Star was brief, only six months, but it influenced every word he put to paper. Eschewing a college education after a successful high school career, Hemingway left Illinois for Kansas City to begin a writing career. 

To mark the occasion of Edmund Wilson’s induction to the Library of America, “that clothbound hall of literary fame,” Charles McGrath offers a fascinating profile of “the most functional alcoholic in all of American letters.” From the New York Times (”A Shaper of the Canon Gets His Place in It“):

Some of his most thrilling stuff, though, is the literary journalism he did for Vanity Fair and The New Republic. Wilson was just a young man then, barely out of Princeton, with a couple of years’ seasoning as a medic in World War I, and he seemingly took every assignment that came his way. He wrote about burlesque shows, for example, judging that the Minsky Brothers Follies was superior to Ziegfeld’s because the girls had bigger breasts and shapelier legs, and he wrote more than once about Houdini, whom he admired as "an audacious and independent being, whose career showed a rare integrity."

I’ll never think of Wilson the same way again.