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The 2008 National Book Award finalists have been announced. Fiction The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead) Telex from Cuba, by Rachel Kushner (Scribner) Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen (Modern Library) Home, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar) The End, by Salvatore Scibona (Graywolf) Nonfiction This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew [...]

Actually, this is quite funny, but I was stuck for a headline. Harper’s picked up ”Excerpt from The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms” from last fall’s Seneca Review. Well worth a glance: prose poem: Either a poem with no line breaks or a lyric essay with no indentation. No one knows. deconstructionism: A moderately successful attempt [...]

Last night, first-time novelist Aravind Adiga became the second-youngest winner of the Man Booker prize. Adiga is 33; his novel is The White Tiger. From The Telegraph (“Man Booker Prize won by first-time Indian author Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger,” by Stephen Adams): He was presented with the award at a dinner in the Guildhall [...]

More Bouchermania. I couldn’t stay for the Anthony Awards, but here are the winners, linked to their Booklist reviews when applicable. Looks as if conference attendees really swooned for guest of honor Laura Lippmann. And, if you enjoy trendspotting, take note of the fact that two of these winners also won Edgars. Best Novel What [...]

Lots of people waking up on the wrong side of the bed this week. Here in the U.S., Martin Luther King’s children are fighting over Barbara Reynolds’ in-progress biography of their father (“Dr. King’s Children Battling Over Book,” by Robbie Brown, The New York Times): “It’s sad and pathetic to see the three of them [...]

I’m back in the office, caught up on e-mail, and beginning to go over the notes that I scribbled in the margins of the Bouchercon program, on the backs of flyers, and on a piece of lined paper ripped from an unsuspecting victim’s spiral-bound notebook. I doubt I’ll get around to writing any kind of comprehensive [...]

  Since I’m surrounded by crime fiction writers, I guess the moment is right to reveal that a piece of my own crime fiction, the short story, “Untitled,” was the second runner-up in Time Out Chicago‘s “Chicago Crime Writers Competition.” The first round was judged by Random House/Vintage Books editorial staff, and Michael Harvey (The Fifth Floor, [...]

I’m in Baltimore at Bouchercon, having a hard time blogging but finding it easy to enjoy lots of panels with a wonderful assortment of crime fiction writers. I’ll try to make some sense of my notes and offer a wrapup on Monday–I’ll also assemble some linked lists of the various award winners. (I’ll be at [...]

The Swedish Academy’s announcement that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature seemed such a foregone conclusion that one wonders why they bothered holding a press conference. I mean, wasn’t everybody expecting this? I kid, people, I kid. Actually, a line in Sarah Lyall’s article for the New York [...]

The Guardian reports that Dacre Stoker, the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, will coauthor a sequel to Dracula (“Stoker’s blood relative to bring Dracula back from the undead,” by Alison Flood). As you might expect, there’s a lot of money on offer for both the book and a movie tie-in. But Stoker is motivated by something greater: “I had [...]