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In the Toronto Star (“Canada Council denies conflict of interest“), Vit Wagner reports on the controversy that erupted following the announcement of one of the poetry winners in the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Jacob Scheier, a Canadian expatriate living in Brooklyn, won for his debut collection, More to Keep Us Warm. And here’s the rub: In [...]

What could be better than winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award? How about an award for an entire career of bad sex in fiction? John Updike was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award for four consecutive nominations, including this year’s The Widows of Eastwick. He was not present to accept his award. Rachel Johnson won this year’s [...]

Robert L. Pincus of the San Diego Union-Tribune has a good question for Joyce Carol Oates (“Joyce Carol Oates on productivity: ‘I love to write’“). Regarding her 54 novels, 31 short-story collections, and sundry other publications, he asks, “Just how does she do it?” But Oates, who can go into great detail at great length [...]

Over at the Christian Science Monitor‘s Chapter & Verse blog, Marjorie Kehe has this to say about BookSwim: They’re calling it “Netflix for books” and the most surprising thing about it is that no one has tried it before. Perhaps unsurprisingly, someone has tried this before. As previously noted by your humble blogger, Booksfree.com beat [...]

There are ten writers up for The Literary Review’s most coveted award this year. And the nominees are: James Buchan for The Gate of Air Simon Montefiore for Sashenka John Updike for The Widows of Eastwick Kathy Lette for To Love, Honour and Betray Alastair Campbell for All in the Mind Rachel Johnson for Shire Hell Isabel Fonseca for Attachment Ann [...]

Audiobook addicts, rejoice: today, we at Booklist Online are proud to introduce the newest member of our family of blogs, Audiobooker.  It’s written by Mary Burkey, a teacher, librarian, and audiobook addict who will be writing about “listening, learning, and the joy of headsets.” This isn’t a launch but a very meaningful change of address. Mary has blogged [...]

The National Book Award winners were announced last night: Fiction Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (Modern Library) Non Fiction The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (Norton) Poetry Fire to Fire by Mark Doty (HarperCollins) Young People’s Literature What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (Scholastic)  Each winner took home a [...]

BBC Newsnight has a segment on the unfinished Nabokov novel, which son Dmitri refuses to burn, in complete defiance of his deceased father’s demand. Maybe it really is a masterpiece, but personally, I think Dmitri just wants the attention. (Or possibly he’s tired of living in the great man’s shadow–check out the giant photographs he’s [...]

Writing in the New York Times, Motoko Rich asks, “For Books, Is Obama the New Oprah?” If he is, he’d better get more specific or he’s going to drive everyone crazy. When President-elect Barack Obama appeared on “60 Minutes” on CBS on Sunday in his first interview since winning the election, he mentioned having read “a [...]

Word on the street has it that Sarah Palin may get as much as $7 million for a book deal. Some people don’t believe it, but one newspaper was bold enough to open an article with the following: She failed to save John McCain from presidential election doom, but Sarah Palin, the Republican senator’s controversial [...]