Pulitzers Say No Go In Fiction

In the wake of today's announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prizes, which in the Arts and Letters categories went to:

• Tracy K. Smith in poetry, for her collection Life on Mars;  
• Quiara Alegría Hudes in drama for her play Water by the Spoonful;
• John Lewis Gaddis in biography for his critical biography Geore F. Kennan: An American Life;
• Stephen Greenblatt in general nonfiction for his critical history and analysis Swerve: How the World Became Modern;
• Kevin Puts in music, for his opera Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts;
• and the late Manning Marable, in history, after it was moved from biography, for Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention;

across the nets people have been noting the decision by the fiction jury, comprising Chair Susan Larson, former book editor at The Times-Picayune and, host of the show The Reading Life on WWNO-FM; Maureen Corrigan, critic in residence at Georgetown University and book critic of NPR's Fresh Air, and novelist and 1999 Pulitzer fiction recipient Michael Cunningham, not to award any of the three finalists the award this year. Who were the three finalists? Dennis Johnson, for Train Dreams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Northwestern University alumna Karen Russell, for Swamplandia! (New York: Alfred A. Knopf); and the late David Foster Wallace, for The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown and Company).

People online have put forward various reasons why none of these novels met the grade. Johnson's supposedly was a republication of an earlier book; Wallace's was posthumously assembled and hardly his strongest work (he was ignored by the Pulitzer committee while he was alive, it should be noted); and Russell's novel, named to top 10 and 25 lists by Publisher's Weekly and NPR...I don't know what happened. The committee (or whoever puts forward the finalists) ignored all of the US finalists and the winner of this yearly cycle's National Book Critics Circle Award. Edith Pearlman (who won for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories), Dana Spiotta (Stone Arabia), Teju Cole (whose Open City I have read and thought one of the best of the year), and Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot), a prior Pulitzer winner in 2002 for his novel Middlesex, were passed over. So too did the Pulitzer committee ignore all of this yearly cycle's National Book Award winners and finalists, who included winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones), Pearlman, Andrew Krivak (The Sojourn), Téa Obreht (whose The Tiger's Wife has received rapturous praise) and Julie Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic), who did receive this year's PEN Faulkner Award for this book.

(I should note that women of color have received more awards this literary award cycle, among them last year's National Book Awards for Fiction and Poetry, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and this year's Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and Drama, perhaps than ever before, a very good sign, not that you'd know this from the lack of attention these authors still generally receive.)

And I could list a raft of works of fiction, novels, short stories, novellas, published since last year's Pulitzer, that should have been seriously considered. So what gives? I don't know, but I also don't know why such an eccentric list emerged in the first place. If anything, given the alleged knock against Johnson's text (and he has received many of the highest literary honors, including the National Book Award for his 2007 novel Tree of Smoke) and the desire, perhaps, not to throw Wallace a posthumous honor, why not just give the prize to Russell, if she made the final trio?  This is, as others who've perused the net are quite aware, not the first time the Pulitzer jury, or the board overseeing the awards, has decided not to name a winner. In 1977 the fiction jury recommended prize go to Norman MacLean for A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (which Robert Redford in 1992 transformed into a beautiful but glacially slow film), but the Pulitzer board, which has sole discretion for awarding the prize, supposedly did not give it. In1974, the fiction jury unanimously recommended the prize go to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but the Pulitzer board apparently said nyet. And in 1971, none of the three novels, The three novels the Pulitzer committee put forth for consideration to the Pulitzer board, Eudora Welty's Losing Battles; Saul Bellow's seethingly racist Mr. Sammler's Planet; and Joyce Carol Oates's The Wheel of Love, were all rejected, thus no award. Bellow received the award in 1976 for Humboldt's Gift, a lesser but less offensive novel, while Welty received it in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter, when any collection of her short stories more obviously merited the honor. Oates has never received the prize, nor has MacLean or Pynchon.

Usually, it seems, there are politics operating behind the scenes, so who knows. Had the Pulitzer Board--which includes many luminaries quite familiar with literature, including classicist, philosopher and political scientist Danielle Allen (of the Institute for Advanced Studies); Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz (also a professor at MIT); author and Columbia J school dean Nicolas Lemann; and University of Pennsylvania historian of the US South and African American history Paul Hahn--felt that none of the selections were adequate, I wish they'd just have picked a book themselves--by Justin Torres (We the Animals), say, or Tayari Jones (Silver Sparrow), or Amy Waldman (The Submission) or Kevin Brockmeier (The Illuminations), or Ann Patchett (State of Wonder), or P. Zamora Lindmark (Leche), or Donald Ray Pollack (The Devil All the Time), or any of the other writers listed above.

Of course some may say who cares? Yes, there have been criticisms that Pulitzer, particularly in the fiction category, usually honors a writer not for her or his best work but sometimes as a form of redress for having missed out on the best work (cf. Faulkner, Hemingway, Bellow, etc.). But recent Pulitzers in fiction have defied this. Is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao not Junot Díaz's masterpiece thus far? Was Middlesex not Jeffrey Eugenides's finest novel? Was The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, not perfectly realized? So that canard ought to be tossed out the window, at least as of recent winners (and nominees). But more importantly, the Pulitzer name, for the winners and finalists, does help draw recognition to literary fiction, and also helps sales, and there are few serious writers living in the US today--not a single person listed above, including the most successful ones--who could not benefit from a sales boost. Let's hope they find three finalists and a sure winner next year.

Junot Díaz Wins Pulitzer Prize + Poem: Forrest Hamer + Review: Dos Caras de Jano/Two Faces of Janus

What great news came down today: Junot Díaz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, roughly a month after receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. As I've said on here before, this one of the best novels I've read in some time, particularly one of the best contemporary novels, and it's also one of the important contemporary works on the issues of Dominicanidad, nation, history, Diaspora, immigration, class, race and, in particular, blackness, that I've come across. Many of the reviews I've read lose sight of this, but it's all there in this remarkable book. Díaz's articulation of Diasporic nerd-dom also is incredibly fresh, as is his use of a postmodern formal structure and his often plangent realism, which makes the stories of the characters so vivid that their sufferings break your heart, not just figuratively, but by the end of the book, literally. It took Díaz 11 years to complete this novel, and it's one of the best responses to the notion that any writers--poets, playwrights, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, anyone--should be churning out work like paper airplanes. Like any lover of great art, I'm grateful, very grateful, that he published this book when he and it were ready, and I'm delighted to be able to congratulate him on this extraordinary honor. As I wrote of the lovely and extremely talented Natasha Trethewey and her collection, The Native Guards last year, the honor went to a truly deserving writer and work.

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Forrest Hamer's most recent collection Rift (Four Way Books, 2007), a past Book Choice here, is so full of great poems, possessed of tremendous lyric force and philosophical depth, that it's hard to choose one to feature this month. So I think I'll choose one of the ones that I keep coming back to, a poem written in a style I would venture is Forrest's own, which is to say, a poem whose title, highlighted, nests in the body of the poem. This small but substantial gesture reorients the eye and mind when reading the poem, making you think about, among other things, embodiment itself, the relation between the poem and how the poet names it, how it functions in terms of the body of the lyric. Forrest, who's a trained and practicing psychoanalyist, is very interested in and writes with great skill about the mind and body, bodies, his, others, ours, but also, without the freight of religion or an established metaphysics, about soul. He was on a panel at this year's AWP that I heard was great, and I wish I could have heard it, and him. He's a poet you don't want to miss. So here is one of several poems titled "Someone I Know." Enjoy!

A woman late in her eighties began once more to feel desire.  She said a
fever came over her so strong at night she would not sleep: she would imagine
all sorts of men, and some women, and all of them left her the sense she
probably was dying, the flushes one last rally to keep her self intact.

Some people can feel full only when passion is strong, so they provoke
others into making them feel.  Others can feel only themselves when feeling
is calmed or seems gone.  And there are others whose sense of being comes
from not being selves at all.  Someone I know doesn't yet know what there
is to tell, and I spend hours with him waiting for the song there is when I hear
best:  sung by me in a language I do not recognize, listening fills me with the
closest I have come to being satisfied.

I would not be beautiful, for that would be another curse; nor would I be on
fire.  The first curse, of course, is knowing.

Copyright © Forrest Hamer, 2007, 2008, from Rift (New York: Four Way Books, 2007), all rights reserved.

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On Saturday afternoon I eagerly traipsed down to the Chicago Latino Film Festival to catch Las Dos Caras de Jano (The Two Faces of Janus), Edmundo H. Rodríguez's film based on Puerto Rican anti-colonial activist and progressive author Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón's fourth novel of the same name. I'd first heard about the film's screening on Blabbeando (mg/ Andrés), and the plot, focusing on a serial killer of gay men in San Juan and a black Puerto Rican detective investigating them, or at least one, was enough to bring me to the theater.

So what's my verdict? Perhaps I should begin by filling in the plot a bit more. The film really comprises two storylines: the background one focuses on the grisly serial murders of gay, mostly middle-class men in San Juan, by an unknown but extremely disturbed "Angel of Bachelors," and the viewer learns about 3/4ths of the way through who the killer is, as he commits one of them, along with the likely motivations behind them. But the foreground story, which links to this larger, more disturbing narrative, centers on a formerly closeted and now openly gay man, whose murder also appears to be part of the serial spree. A friend of the murdered man asks handsome but often-frowning detective Isabelo Andújar Jr. (Modesto Lacén, above right, after the screening) to investigate, and he quickly homes in on the trio of close friends, from university days, of the murdered man. One is a wealthy, pompous, and unabashedly racist banker (who refers to Andújar at one point as "Buckwheat"); the second is a Marxist university professor; and the third is a DL architect. Andújar also looks at the boyfriend, a former student of the murdered man; a male hustler who, we learn, is servicing a powerful member of the Puerto Rican Senate; and the murdered man's ex-wife, who is a prime but not very convincing suspect. Along the way, Andújar also has a discussion on gay identity, being out, and self-hatred with a young gay male employee of the pharmacy where his girlfriend, a blonde Puerto Rican woman, works, that keys him in to the film's title and the idea behind it; for closeted men, their existence is like the two faces of Janus, one turned towards the light, the other one, hidden, towards the darkness. Ultimately, through a series of revelations, about the sorts of accommodations that married couples make and the nature of the closet in Puerto Rico's machismo society, Andújar identifies the killer, with even more tragic consequences.

I appreciated the many themes and topics the film addressed or attempted to address. It dealt with class, race and racism, sexual orientation, identification and gender roles, internalized violence and sexual repression and oppression, the power of social and political capital, failed political dreams and accommodation, and so much more. In the short space of the film, Rodríguez (and the screenwriter Gilberto Rodríguez, drawing from Mattos Cintrón's work), portrayed a fairly rich portrait of contemporary San Juan, showing it to be more diverse and cosmopolitan than I might have imagined, while also portraying some of the longstanding retrograde attitudes that still exist. The portrayal of Andújar captures this. While he evidently harbors residual homophobic attitudes--he cannot not bring himself to say the word "gay," choosing instead, as others in the film did, to say "homosexual," until he was corrected by a gay man--his general outlook was portrayed as somewhere between benign and indifferent. Even when he's being aggressively macked by the murdered gay man's boyfriend, his response is to deflect it, and not, as might be the case elsewhere, to go plumb loco. Ultimately, we see that he grasps the true sadness and sorrow at the core of the murderer's actions, but he doesn't grasp the despair, which tips over into sentimentalism and melodrama, that has led to the crime. It's also apparent that he, nor anyone else, for that matter, appears to care about the more extensive series of murders that have occurred; ultimately the film ends with a scene of domestic bliss, in which the black detective and his white girlfriend--both Puerto Rican, of course--can finally come together and find a place within this society, while gay men, we gather, will continue to be killed off, without any recourse to anything beyond partial acceptance and the threat of violence.

Rodríguez, following Mattos Cintrón, draws a parallel between the social hostility and actual and symbolic violence against gays and the various manifestations of racism. One of the film's running jokes is that some people, fellow Puerto Ricans, including some who are visibly of African descent, do see the very dark-skinned Andújar (Lacén at right, with Rebecca Hazlewood, as Chandra, photo from Rojo Tomate) but don't really seem him, except as an alien, an outsider, or a stereotype of one sort or another. But in the case of the latter, not the kinds we might first imagine. In one case, he's mistaken for a babalawayo (santero); in another, a child thinks he's the wise man and king Melchior; in yet another moment, he's thought to be a caddy, a scene that could easily appear in a mainstream US film. In yet another moment, a little boy is terrified just by the sight of this black man, something I've personally experienced in the US more than once, though thankfully it doesn't happen that much any more. Andújar mostly parries this racism, but in an argument with his girlfriend, he articulates his frustration, both with religion and Christmas, but also with the ignorance he has to deal with, noting that the black king he's been mistaken for is actually Balthazar, and that, when his girlfriend offers to celebrate Hannukah and even Kwanzaa if that will inspire some holiday spirit in him, he rejects both, citing the latter as an "American" invention, inauthentic and no remedy for the malaise in the heart and soul he's carrying around. Just as Andújar is the antithesis of racist stereotypes of blacks, the film's portrayal of gay men mostly avoids stereotypes as well, though the narrative of self-loathing resulting in violence and melodrama, though based on a real story, harkens back to deterministic, pre-liberation narratives of gay male life.

While the digital video cinematography is admirably crisp, the filmmaking itself feels little clumsy at times, with shots and effects not really adding up as they could and the editing not as tight as it could be. The gauzy flashbacks are a particular problem. Another issue is the acting: many of the actors over-emote, or act a bit more stagily than is necessary, which I take to be an issue of direction rather than anything else. One example is Mr. Tagore (Vik Kumar), the DL South Asian (see, I said the film showed San Juan as cosmopolitan) storeowner, who klieglights his closetedness fairly quickly, or rather his wife's obvious unhappiness, in combination with his theatricality, does so. Just a little more restraint would have gone a long way. Lacén unfortunately has to spend a good deal of the film trying to look and act as glum, disaffected and serious as is humanly possible, but when he's got something to work with, he's great, and he's a glory to look at, a force field of beauty at the center of the film. What I told C when I recounted my thoughts on the film was this: while there are some obvious faults with the acting, directing and script, the overall ideas and freshness of the story outweighed them for me, and I was glad I saw the film and suggest others do to if it comes through where you are. As one of the producers, Iván de Paz, who was present with Lacén after the screening noted, the film tackles issues that are still very controversial in Puerto Rico (not just homophobia, but also classicism, racism, and "interracial couples," to use his words), in a fairly direct way.

At the top of this review is a photo I took of Modesto Lacén, chatting with someone who was in the screening and afterwards was talking up black film festivals in California. If you want to see Lacén these days, catch the off-Broadway production of Celia: The Life and Story of Celia Cruz, in which I believe he said he plays the great salsera's husband, Pedro Knight (photo at left from the NY Post, Xiomara Laugart, at left, as Celia Cruz and Modesto Lacén, at right, as her husband.) I hope he gets on the Diasporic bandwagon and gets even more roles both in PR and on the mainland: he's a winner.

Junot Díaz in the House + Kennedy Play on Broadway + Ayler on Film

After one of my always too-brief trips home, I headed back west to teach and host this year's Visiting Fiction Writer-in-Residence, Junot Díaz, who flew in for a whirlwind visit from Rome, where he's spending the year on a Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As part of his visit, he met with our senior-year writers over two days, spoke to my fiction major advanced sequence class, where he discussed the issue of how to shift from short fiction, which the students are working on now (3 longish stories by the end of the first half of the course) to longer forms (like the novella they'll have to complete by June); delivered a talk about craft, which the students who attended were still talking about a day later; and read a brief section from his new novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (one of my October and November book selections), as well as a very brief story, "Alma," before opening the floor to questions. I was incredibly pleased that Díaz was able to join us, and especially appreciated his graciousness, openness, and thoughtfulness when he was with the students, some of whom told me immediately after that class that they found his comments "excellent." (Personally, I also love his REALNESS.) They were taking notes assiduously, and even, like several other colleagues who primarily teach different genres (poetry, creative nonfiction), scribbled down some of what he had to say at the talk. In essence, he broke it down in terms of the issue of character and how important it was (is) to fiction writing, and how characters in relation to each other and the other elements of fiction, which is to say, character as transactional, was what writers ought to keep in mind. He stressed that his comments weren't meant to be prescriptive or proscriptive, but he also then noted that as fiction editor of the Boston Review, he saw a great deal of stories that were really stories of "condition," static, lacking conflict and what emerges from it, without any real movement in terms of narrative arc or dramatic arc, let alone plot(tedness); his emphasis on character(s), the source of conflict, was an effort to counter this. At the reading, both the excerpt from the novel and "Alma" illustrated his points, while also demonstrating how you could artfully negotiate the dangerous ground of second-person narration (you), an issue my graduate class and I have been exploring to some extent (Jhumpa Lahiri's May 6, 2006 New Yorker story "All in a Lifetime," is exemplary in this regard). It was also pleasing to see that both the talk and the reading were packed, and that students as well as people not directly affiliated with the university (hey LaToya!) not only showed up, but actively posed questions and engaged Díaz in conversation. Below are a few photos I snapped with my camera phone, which is 1,000x better than the previous one.

Díaz chatting with one of my introductory fiction students, Andrés, after his talk

The crowd slowly filling up before the reading

Díaz reading his short story, "Alma"

Díaz answering questions after his reading

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On a different note, for those in New York City and environs, please consider catching the current, brief run of one of my favorite plays, The Ohio State Murders, by one of my favorite authors and cultural hero(in)es, Adrienne Kennedy. Charles Isherwood's mostly laudatory New York Times review today provides some useful background on 76-year-old Kennedy, a treasure of American and African-American literature, and on the work itself, which is relatively formally conventional by Kennedy's standards, but quite challenging in its themes and content, as it delves into her usual trove of racially and sexually inflected uncanniness, with parallel selves, twins, intertextual critique, insanity, and a mysterious murder all mixed together for a haunting measure.

Isherwood criticizes the production, which he suggests could have used a larger, deeper set to enhance the play's eerieness, its underlying terror, but I guess I'd have to see it to judge this. (Point of fact, I've never seen the play, but have read it many times and taught it as well.) This run stars The Practice's LisaGay Hamilton (at right, standing, with Cherise Boothe, from New York Times, Gerry Goodstein) whose performance Isherwood calls "spellbinding." That's quite a compliment, so catch it and be bound by her--and Kennedy's spell--if you can.

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There are people for whom the words and phrases "Bells," "Witches and Devils," "Ghosts," "Spiritual Unity," and "New York Eye and Ear Control" conjure a name instantly: Albert Ayler. The saxophone visionary, adept of Cecil Taylor and protegé of John Coltrane, who blazed on the public scene in the early 1960 and made around a dozen landmark records, only to be found floating in the East River in 1970, is one musician whose work, once heard, usually isn't forgotten or mistaken for anyone else's. And not only not forgotten; as a friend once said to me after listening to Spirits Rejoice, she had nightmares and was afraid to be alone in her apartment for a while afterwards. My experience was different, but I recognize that Ayler's music, particularly the late-career inner ear-shearing honks, bleats, shrieks, cries, hollers, and wails, couched within more than a little soulful swinging, to my mind the sonic embodiments of an almost indescribable freedom, and its antecedent and parallel, suffering, that were so palpable for millions of Americans, especially Black Americans, during the period of his career, are not for everyone. Or really for anyone but those who're able and willing to listen. If you've never listened to Ayler's music--and I went through my 20s phase of trying to ferret out every obscure Black musician I could get my hands on, which is how I came across him, and am glad I did, since he was not part of the expansive r&b, soul, rock&roll, and jazz soundscape in which I grew up--there's a new film out, playing for a week at Film Forum in, where else, New York City: Kasper Collin's My Name is Albert Ayler. The New York Sun's reviewer likes it quite a bit. According to another review I saw, it's antithetical to the Burns model; consisting of audio snippets of performances and interviews with Ayler and those close to him, still imagery, and video clips of family members and associates, it sounds like it jars the viewer out of spectatorial passivity. Which seems appropriate in Ayler's case. Ayler's no easy study. But you just might dig him a lot. A whole lot. In small doses.

Sautumner Cont. + Nobelaureation + Beisbol

S/aut/um/n/er Cont.
It's amazing how quickly a week flies by, particularly when you're making your way through a thicket of short stories and critical papers. So far so good with all three classes, all three of which will be immersed in the literary art of Junot Díaz, who's scheduled to visit in early November. His new novel, which I'm reading now and which is one of my October book picks, is one of the most remarkable I've read in a long time, particularly for its sheer verbal daring and verve. The stories he tells are also deeply compelling.

The warm weather has thrown my compass off, though. Yesterday it was so humid it felt like July, and all the surfaces in the kitchen are tacky, as if they'd just been sprayed with adhesive. Even the leaves on the trees are still green. Maybe it was this warm last fall in Chicago, though I can't remember much, of course, from last fall except my class, the Cave Canem 10th anniversary celebration, and taking on the new administrative post....

UPDATE: I knew the Chicago Marathon was running today, which was enough to keep me far away from downtown, but I hadn't realized until I spoke with C this evening that in fact, it was so hot that someone fell dead during the race (I'm sorry to hear this occurred) and the officials finally called the event off, though not before Patrick Ivuti of Kenya--by an eyelash--and Ethiopian Berhane Adere respectively won the mens' and women's races.

Nobelaureation
Every year I engage in a bit of prognosticating about the Nobel Prize in literature, which'll be announced this upcoming week. Reggie H. sent me a link to Marlon James's picks, which are intriguing. I've said before that Adonis (Adunis), Saadi Youssef, or Mahmoud Darwish are likely pics, especially given that only one Arabic-language writer (the late Egyptian fiction writer Naguib Mahfouz) has received the prize, that a playwright and screenwriter (Harold Pinter) and a novelist (Orhan Pamuk) were the last two selections, and that the Middle East is a political flashpoint, and the Swedish Academy appears eager these days to make political statements with the awards. By this measure, Nuruddin Farah, the Somali novelist, and Assia Djebar, the utterly original Algerian-French author, are also likely considerations. There is the question of genre, though, and the additional issue that some nations, like Brazil, Vietnam, and Indonesia have never had a writer honored, while others, like India and China, have had their greatest writers selected only once (or infrequently). So Rubem Fonseca, Sergio Sant'Anna or Ferreira Gullar of Brazil; Duong Thu Thuong of Vietnam; Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia; any of India's acclaimed authors, but in particular Salman Rushdie, for example; and China's Mo Yan, may be tipped. Among the American authors, there's always John Ashbery, of course, who probably should be honored for his influence on English-language poetry alone; others include the oft-suggested Philip Roth, as well as W. S. Merwin, and E.L. Doctorow (nominated this year for a Neustadt International Prize). More unusual selections would be one of my favorite writers, Jay Wright, or the much younger Richard Powers, one of the most prodigiously talented contemporary fiction writers. Canada's authors, who've never received a Nobel Prize, both Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood would make excellent candidates. The former is one of the greatest living short stories writers in the English language, and the latter is one of the most important novelists, as well as a notable poet. Maryse Condé and Kamau Brathwaite are also excellent, perennial candidates, as is another writer whose despite being a nonagenarian continues his singular work, Wilson Harris. There are many other highly acclaimed, deserving writers, like Claribel Alegría of Nicaragua, Haruki Murakami of Japan (one of my favorites), David Malouf of Australia, Luisa Valenzuela of Argentina, Juan Goytisolo, Javier Marías and Julián Ríos of Spain, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru (a politically repellant pick, but a great author), Yoel Hoffmann, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz of Israel, or Carlos Fuentes of Mexico. A few years ago, Vargas Llosa wrote, apropos of Fonseca, that the time of the linguistically-oriented work, as embodied in the work of French 1985 laureate Claude Simon, had passed, though subsequent winners, like Toni Morrison, José Saramago, Camilo José Cela, and Elfriede Jelinek have belied this to some degree, it's clear that political engagement of some sort must also be part of the mix. Certainly it has been the case with Pamuk, Pinter, Jelinek, Coetzee, Kertesz....

And whom are you picking? (Brilliant as they are, Edwidge Danticat and Zadie Smith are still too young to win it just yet.)

Béisbol Been Bery, Bery Bad to Chicago (Again)
One week into the baseball playoffs, and the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies are out, while the two less heralded teams from Arizona (the Diamondbacks) and Colorado (the Rockies) are now in the National League Championship series. Arizona has a young, gung ho team of budding stars (Chris Young, Eric Byrnes, Brandon Webb) with several very sharp starting pitchers, while Colorado brings a battery that would make the Yankees jealous. I can't see which of these teams will win, though if Arizona's lineup keeps hitting, I think they have the edge.

Speaking of the Yankees, their convicted-felon-but-pardoned owner has just nnounced that unless they somehow sneak past Cleveland, now up 2-0, he is canning manager Joe Torre, who led the Yankees to four World Series wins (1996, 1998-2000), and 13 straight post-season trips, but hasn't won it all for the loudmouth since W took office. Poor guy; every year he has a threat like this hanging over his head, internal team dramas (including a known steroid user, the Stray-Rod scandal, etc.) and shaky starting pitching, usually consisting of people older than me on the mound, and every year he takes the team to its limit. After the way Cleveland has played, including Fausto Carmona (above, AP Photo/Tony Dejak, Pool) surviving a mid-game midge attack, though, I think Yankee fans ought to begin saying their goodbyes to Torre. The team is not hitting--A-Rod is again swinging like he's never seen a breaking pitch--and Cleveland's pitching is a major reason why. It's kind of sad, but they almost appear to want things to end. It would at least a few less weeks of tension and the overbearing Steinbrenner, after all. Their main nemeses, the Boston Red Sox, are tormenting the Angels of Los Angeles-Anaheim, and appear set to extend their overhyped road show on national TV screens perhaps into the World Series, though I'm hoping for Cleveland to pull an upset.

Back to the Cubs: they looked like they didn't know why they were on the field. Not that I was surprised, but this time, they couldn't blame it on poor Steve Bartman. Now Cubs fans, where's that goat?