Alice Munro just won the Giller Prize.

In their citation, the three jurors described Munro's collection as "haunting stories told with unflinching honesty, in a language precise and informed, yet beautifully simple, whose meanings taunt the mind long after we have finished them."

Munro previously won the Giller Prize in 1998 for The Love of a Good Woman. She competes against Toews again next week for the Governor General's Literary Award.

From today's Washington Post:

After receiving hundreds of responses to its call for returning soldiers to write about their recent war experiences, the National Endowment for the Arts has decided to extend its Operation Homecoming initiative.

The program to create an anthology of writing from veterans deployed overseas since Sept. 11, 2001, was announced last spring. Yesterday NEA chairman Dana Gioia said the program will be extended three months and the agency plans to conduct writing workshops at 20 bases, instead of the 10 to 12 originally planned.

"The program has been an overwhelming success. I don't think the NEA fully appreciated the need and demand for the program when we first launched it," Gioia said. "We have doubled the size of the program."

The article goes on to note that Andrew Carroll has been named editor of the forthcoming anthology.

If a reviewer takes on a popular book two months after its publication date, it's right to hope the delay is offset by a rare thoughtfulness -- thoughts having progressed over time like evolution in fast-forward: single-cell thoughts multiplying, swarming into complex patterns, adding new capacities.

And so, it's also right to find Sacha Zimmermanin's review of Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell in today's "Pulps" column disappointing:

"Such power! Such inventiveness! English magic today lacks spirit! It lacks fire and energy! I cannot tell you how bored I am of the same dull spells to solve the same dull problems. The glimpse I had of your magic proved to me that it is quite different. You could surprize me. And I long to be surprized!"

The same could be said of Clarke's book compared with the usual suspects on the best-seller list. Perhaps America has surprised me--or perhaps it is magic!

National Book Award nominee Joan Silber isn't too upset by the backlash against a fiction shortlist that includes her "ring of stories," Ideas of Heaven, and books by four other women. She's actually managing to enjoy being at the heart of a literary scandal. "I didn't think that was ever going to happen to me," she joked over a late morning coffee at Housing Works recently.

"And it's not personal," she went on. "The wounding thing is when people say they don't like the books themselves. The general attacks just seem… stupid."

Fellow nominee Lily Tuck agreed, and pointed out the industry's confused (or even "double-faced") posturing over the awards. "Last year, when the National Book Foundation nominated Stephen King for a lifetime achievement award," she recalled, "there was a huge hue and cry about how he was a popular writer, not a literary writer. Now they're screaming and yelling that we’re too literary and not popular enough." She's glad for the nomination, though, especially because it offers new life for her novel, The News from Paraguay. "The book was about to disappear completely," she recalled. "It wasn't exactly remaindered, but it had been sent back to the warehouse." Silber added, "There's a sticker on my book now, so whatever happens, I feel that I'm more on the map, and that's enjoyable."

- from "Hanging Out with Joan Silber & Lily Tuck", at Beatrice.com

The general attacks, I agree, are quite stupid -- but Caryn James' diatribe in today's NY Times -- "Book Award Becomes a Feast of Canapes" -- seems to appeal to stupidity simply out of spite. Here, a quick list of her charges against the NBA's nominations:

There's such a tyranny of white space in these already-short books that a chapter running a few pages feels like "War and Peace." Have the book-award judges been watching too much MTV, causing their attention spans to atrophy? The sarcasm only reminds me of the fact that James is 1) a TV critic who "watches television the way most people listen to music," and 2) a TV critic who just admitted short chapters feel as long to her as War and Peace. Is there some Freudian theory that describes this procedure? -- Rhetorical-questions-as-confession?

Yet all five are built on compressed observations that easily veer into precious writers' program language, too woozy and poetic for its own good. Usually, writing programs get blamed for bland, unadventurous, too-tidy prose. But perhaps we can blame them for any prose style we dislike: if the prose is formulaic, it's the fault of a writing-by-committee education; if the prose is experimental, it's the result of too much time spent locked in ivory towers.

That claustrophobic sameness doesn't help readers. Awards are inherently silly, but there's a method to their silliness. Whether it's the National Book Awards, the Tonys or the Oscars, contests become guides to what the public might want to catch up on, offering something-for-everyone choices. Bestselling books don't need more exposure; good books being "sent back to the warehouse" do. Even if a contest should function as a guide (a proposition stated by James but not pursuasively supported), why argue that the guide should restrict itself to books covered three times over in the New York Times? Should the NBA allow the media to be its gatekeeper? (As for making the NBAs more like the Oscars: don't encourage Ethan Hawke, Ms. James. Please.)

By trying to strong-arm readers' taste, the judges are guaranteeing that their prize remains marginal. "Trying to strong-arm"? (As in, "James is trying to strong-arm the judges' taste"?) Bookish types might read the NBA nominees, but what bookish type feels obliged to change his taste based on nominations? Putting that phrasing -- and its strange evocation of cultural violence -- aside, James's point seems to go like this: To be popular, a prize must nominate popular work. A smarter article, then, might examine the NBA's aims, rather than assign them and proceed to critique the nominations for the ways they undermine imaginary goals.

# 11/11/2004 02:20:01 PM

Some computer problems at GC headquarters.
Will steal boyfriend's computer shortly.