Too many to post here, but you can download the PDF (what, no HTML?!?!) at the Audio Publishers Association site. After the award ceremony on May 30, I’ll try to post and link the winners…in all 29 categories. (What, 30 was too many?)

On Galleycat, Ron Hogan is continuing his campaign to get the New York Times Book Review to replace Dave Itzkoff. Itzkoff recently made the following jaw-dropping statement (”Across the Universe: Elsewhere’s Children“):

I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and - finally - genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

He also wrote (one presumes “playfully,” but still):

Like his fellow Britons Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl, Miéville has no illusions about what utter bastards children can be….

I’m not in favor of treating childhood sentimentally–or treating kid lit like instruction manuals, for that matter–but I’m inclined to agree with Hogan that perhaps the NYTBR isn’t making the best use of Itzkoff’s talents.

A great detective story, starring journalist and author Robert Fisk. From The Independent (”The curious case of the forged biography,” by Robert Fisk):

Needless to say, I noticed one or two problems with this book. It took a very lenient view of the brutality of Saddam, it didn’t seem to care much about the gassed civilians of Halabja - and it was full of the kind of purple passages which I loathe. “After the American rejection of the Iraqi weapons report to the UN,” ‘Robert Fisk’ wrote, “the beating of war drums turned into a cacophony…”

Dare I suggest to readers that this kind of cliche doesn’t sound like Robert Fisk? The only war drums I could hear were those of my own astonishment. For I never wrote this book. It wasn’t plagiarism - a common practice in Cairo, which is why I ensure that all my real books are legally published in Arabic in Lebanon. No, this wasn’t plagiarism. This was forgery.

In the Los Angeles Times (”A classic, or a fraud?“), Philip L. Fradkin keeps alive the ghost of Wallace Stegner’s sins, reexamining the curious case of Angle of Repose. Fradkin borrows from–but doesn’t plagiarize–Jonathan Lethem. (Although he plagiarizes other writers. Read it, you’ll see what I mean. Lethem did it better.)

Criticism of Stegner’s use of Foote’s material has circulated mainly among academics and some feminists and has gone largely unnoticed by the public, even though a magazine article in this newspaper drew attention to the issue five years ago. Whether Stegner was guilty of plagiarism and slander, as his harshest critics maintain, the complexity of the act has never been completely explored.

It’s important to remember that Stegner had permission to use the material and that he acknowledged its use, sort of. There were extenuating circumstances. As is often the case in life, it is the gray areas that predominate and are most interesting.

For another Stegner-related controversy, click here.