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Actually, I don’t think I can blame Ed Champion for this one. The last video was funny. I don’t think this one is supposed to be funny. Don’t feel obligated to watch the whole thing. Please.

The 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize regional winners have been announced. Africa Best Book: The Hangman’s Game, by Karen King-Aribisala (Peepal Tree) (Nigeria) Best First Book: Imagine This, by Sade Adeniran (SW) (Nigeria) Canada and Caribbean Best Book: The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins) (Canada) Best First Book: The End of the Alphabet, by CS Richardson (Doubleday [...]

A long time ago, back in the pre-embedded video days, I saved some links that I found, I think, via Edward Champion. Why, here’s one now!

From the Washington Post (“Australian Author Wins Lindgren Award,” by Malin Rising): STOCKHOLM, March 12 — Australian author Sonya Hartnett is the winner of the $818,000 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature, the largest children’s book award in the world. Hartnett, 39, published her first novel, “Trouble All the Way,” at the age of 15 [...]

Quadruple-threat Dan Kraus (editor/writer/filmmaker/champion pastry chef) alerted me to a simple hack that allows me to embed video in this here WordPress blog. So I’m going to go ahead and do that–and what better test case than a video shot and edited by multiple-hyphenate Dan Kraus? Hey, it works!

Seattle’s influence in the world of books looms large of late, but Nancy Pearl can’t take all the credit–no, she has to share it with Amazon, Starbucks, and Costco. In the New York Times (“Book Lovers Ask, What’s Seattle’s Secret?”), Julie Bick examines the retail giants’ bookselling strategies: microlevel, one-book-fits-all, and by-the-pallet. Perhaps because it’s Seattle, the executives speak of “ideals,” “an [...]

Kate Christensen is the winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, for her novel The Great Man (Doubleday). From the Washington Post (“Behind Every Great Man . . . ” by Bob Thompson): “I’m really shocked,” she said in a telephone interview. To her, an award like the PEN/Faulkner “always seemed unattainable.” Among other reasons, in the 28 [...]

I wasn’t not blogging yesterday because I was too busy reading the endless takes and updates on false memories, but that could easily have been the case. Whew. Motoko Rich places Peggy Seltzer aka Margaret B. Jones as merely the latest in a long line of literary liars (“A Family Tree of Literary Fakers,” New [...]

The National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced. Criticism The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross (Farrar) Poetry Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf) Biography Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, by Tim Jeal (Yale) General Nonfiction Medical Apartheid, by Harriet Washington (Doubleday) Autobiography Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf) Fiction [...]

The Margaret Seltzer story (ably updated at Galleycat) got me to thinking about Laura Albert (aka JT Leroy). Where is she now? To explain how she’s wound up where she has, Laura first whips out the platitudes, about taking problems of the soul and turning them into art; about following in a distinguished line of [...]