It's not all about the fiction. (Right?)

• The New Republic, finally getting around to NBA nonfiction nominee Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, argues that the book "shows small understanding of how to weigh historical evidence; and its notion of the creative process, and of the relation between a writer's work and a writer's life, is naive." Consider, writes Richard Jenkyns, the following argument (of Jenkyn's fabrication):

  Some people have birthmarks, and so Shakespeare may have had one. If he had a birthmark (and this cannot be proved), it would have added to his self-consciousness when he came to London. In romances, the lost princess is often identified by a birthmark, but Perdita, the lost princess in The Winter's Tale, is identified by some tokens; and this at once becomes explicable if Shakespeare was sensitive about his birthmark. When Shakespeare withdrew from London to Stratford in his mid-forties, he was doubtless moved by personal considerations, such as the desire to live the life of a gentleman and also sensitivity about a birthmark. 
  
  Everyone will recognize that this is an absurd type of speculation; but Greenblatt constantly proceeds in this manner, especially in the first half of the book ... Recurrently, he starts with a speculation that cannot be disproved. This is then allowed to evolve into a serious possibility, and then into a likelihood, and sometimes it is even presented as a fact.

• The 9/11 Commission Report is "drawing criticism from historians and writers who say it does not deserve a literary prize," reports the San Fransisco Chronicle.

  Critics call the best-selling report an inappropriate choice because: (1) it was written by committee, (2) it avoids placing blame and (3) it tells the story of the Sept. 11 attacks in an inappropriately dramatic and entertaining narrative.

  Then again, the Chronicle notes, these are also "the features for which the report has been lavishly praised."
  
  
  • Related: Phillip D. Zelikow, the report's "principal author," chats on NPR about "the writing style used, how he was initially brought on to the project and how he answers the report's critics."
  
  
  
• Last month, PW asked who, among the 9/11 Report's many "anonymous" collaborators, would attend the National Book Award ceremony. (For those without PW subscriptions, GC posted a brief excerpt here.) Today, PW gets its answer:

  Thomas Kean, who was chair of the 9/11 Commission, and commissioner Jamie Gorelick will both take the podium, with Kean speaking, according to Norton's Louise Brockett. (As for who actually gets that medal, Brockett said she suspects it will be Kean but said she has no final word on how any sharing might take place).
  
  The house will bring six people officially connected to the report to the ceremony, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director who will also read at the annual Tuesday affair. The house is taking two tables, for 9/11 people as well as for its two other finalists, Stephen Greenblatt and Joan Silber.

  (According to the Lit Saloon, however, the answer was always "crystal clear." The rules state that "everybody -- and we mean everybody -- behind the report better be there.")
  
  
• In its overview of NBA-nominated poetry, the CS Monitor reveals the frightening influence of James's argument that the NBAs should be just as "silly" as the Oscars:

  Literary awards often feel like the Oscar race for Best Picture. Fans hope the finalists will be outstanding and the winner an undeniable classic. But often the nominees are simply good, occasionally even questionable, and the chosen film is a bit disappointing. Poetry lovers may feel the same way about this year's finalists for the National Book Award.

• An anonymous reader reports, "NY agent Lori Perkins, best known lately for that still-frothing Jenna Jameson bio, is preparing for a bid war on a terrorism-related novel, The Stone Town Cell. Our Boston contacts tell us the novel is based on the '98 bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania; co-written by the former US Ambassador, it has a black protagonist/ hero/ Ambassador, a white John Walker Lindh type villain, and is ready-made for the Big Screen."
  
  
• Barnes & Noble reports a 25 percent drop in third-quarter earnings. Steve Riggio, chief executive officer of B&N, attributes the loss to "difficult comparisons against last year's strong sales of bestselling books." Reuters also notes that B&N blames the recent U.S. presidential election "for keeping shoppers glued to their television sets instead of shopping."
  
  
• Meanwhile, TheBookseller.com reports that book sales have "continued to accelerate towards Christmas" but lagged "behind their value in the same week last year," according to Nielsen BookScan data. In its own report on the holday season, PW notes that, while some booksellers are "highly enthusiastic," others contacted for comment "did not want to talk--mainly because of their glum predictions."
  
  
• The NY Sun profiles Melville House Books, founded by MobyLives proprieter Dennis Loy Johnson and his wife, Valerie Merians. "In effect, Mr. Johnson, 46, and Ms. Merians, 42 [have] created a small but enticing American boutique, in which some of the biggest names in the French literary world can market their goods."
  
  
• "What writer today can ape Pynchon and make a virtue of anonymity?" asks Cristina Odone in the Observer.

  Witness ... Martin Amis, recently caught rabbiting on about his pilates in the features pages of a daily, in order to keep his visibility high. And what of the Australian writer Don Watson, who was told that his darkly comic bestseller, Death Sentence, must be changed to Gobbledygook because Waterstone's did not think a 'dark' title would sell?

... I'm probably better off just serving up a nice quote for Alfred A. Knopf to pull -- ''Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. 'Runaway' is a marvel'' -- and suggesting to the Book Review's editors that they run the biggest possible photograph of Munro in the most prominent of places ...

Here's the ad. (First spotted here.)

Here's the quote: "Which leaves me with the simple instruction that I began with: Read Munro! Read Munro!"

Here's some doubts about the ad -- from the review the ad is quoting:

At the risk of sounding like a pleader on behalf of yet another underappreciated writer -- and maybe you've learned to recognize and evade these pleas? The same way you've learned not to open bulk mail from certain charities? Please give generously to Dawn Powell? Your contribution of just 15 minutes a week can help assure Joseph Roth of his rightful place in the modern canon? -- I want to circle around Munro's latest marvel of a book, ''Runaway,'' by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.

• David Brooks wastes precious NYT Op-Ed space defending I Am Charlotte Simmons:

  It's easy to write a negative review of a Tom Wolfe novel; hundreds of people do it every few years. First, out of the thousands of sociological details Wolfe gets right, you pick out some he gets wrong (thus establishing your superior hipness). You mention that he obsesses over the superficial details of life while you ignore his moral intent (thus hinting at your own superior depth). Then you graciously allow that many of Wolfe's scenes are hilarious, while lamenting that his characters are not fully developed. Then you call it a day.

• Also on the Op-Ed page: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi explains her lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department:

  I was surprised and angered when I learned that regulations in the United States make it nearly impossible for me to write a book for Americans. Despite federal laws that say that American trade embargoes may not restrict the free flow of information, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control continues to regulate the import of books from Iran, Cuba and other countries. In order to skirt the laws protecting the flow of information, the government prohibits publishing "materials not fully created and in existence." Therefore, I could publish my memoir in the United States, but it would be illegal for an American literary agent, publisher, editor or translator to help me.

• Madonna's latest book for children, The Adventures of Abdi, "centres on Italian greyhound Lotsa de Casha, a wealthy dog who is still unhappy." Who knew money couldn't buy dogs happiness?
  
  
• As already widely reported, Tom Hanks is set to star in the big screen adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. (As if GC needed another reason to avoid Da Movie.)
  
  
• Beatrice passes along Page Six's recap of the Paris Review shindig:

  The literati at the Paris Review Foundation gala honoring William Styron at Cipriani on 23rd Street the other night raised a collective eyebrow when MC John Guare was unceremoniously booted offstage by a crowd of can-can dancers. Playwright Guare had prepared a long, rambling speech in which he rhapsodized about late Paris Review founder George Plimpton, the rare Hadada bird, Ghana, egrets and New Guinea that dragged on for more than 25 minutes. Organizers tried to be polite, but the only way they could get him to stop talking was by sending in the dancers. Guare looked noticeably annoyed when he appeared on stage later to introduce novelist Peter Matthiessen.

Michael Dirda's review of Edmund White's Arts and Letters suffers, at first, from over-extended speculation on the meaning of White's book jacket photo, but quickly redeems itself with ample quotes from White's latest:

White is ... adept at summing up a life in a line: In his middle years Marcel Duchamp "supported himself giving French lessons to attractive women." Compared to himself, he writes, Bruce Chatwin "was far more handsome and famous and looked ten years younger, but whatever envy I might have had was eliminated by his physical generosity -- a strategy I recommend to the enviable everywhere."

Of Nabokov, White writes,

"It is Nabokov's genius (as one might speak of the genius of a place or of a language) to have kept alive almost single-handedly in our century a tradition of tender sensuality. In most contemporary fiction tenderness is a sexless family feeling and sensuality either violent or impersonal or both. By contrast, Nabokov is a Pascin of romantic carnality. He writes in 'Spring in Fialta,': 'Occasionally in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.' Only a man who loved women as much as he desired them could write such a passage."

"Almost 150 novels chosen by 185 libraries around the world," the BBC reports, have made the IMPAC Award's longlist. Mark Haddon's Whitbread winner, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, as well as DBC Pierre's Booker winner, Vernon God Little, made the cut, along with books by Margaret Atwood, Anita Shreve, JM Cotezee, Rose Tremain, Paulo Coelho, and -- no joke -- Dan Brown. You can read the full list here, at the IMPAC Award's official website.

Recaps and updates:

• Herman Gollob, a former co-chairman of the National Book Foundation, tells Reuters he "had never heard of any of this year's fiction finalists and was not encouraged to read them." He continued, "It's supposed to be an achievement award for the best that's been done, not a feel good award for aspiring writers."
• Whatever happened to the last 3/4 of Journal News's NBA recap? "Perhaps," writes TEV's Mark Sarvas, "the author stumbled [across] Laura Miller's noxious, incoherent rantings on the same and merely threw up his hands in despair ..."
• Book Angst's Mad Max Perkins recommends putting the fiction nominees "into Witness Protection until the night of the Awards banquet."
• Meanwhile, MobyLives' Dennis Loy Johnson visits NBA judge Rick Moody, "holed up in fear on his private island." "They're trying to kill me!" he'd wailed on the phone.
• Terry Teachout, speaking of his own experience as a judge for the NBA, writes, "What we didn't do was engage in horsetrading or logrolling, speculate on how our picks would be received by the literary community, or attempt to Make a Statement."
• Some investigative browsing on the part of The Millions (A Blog About Books) reveals the author referred to in Beatrice's blind item as Jim Shepard (Project X, Love and Hydrogen).

FYI: Later today, look for a long series of thoughts on the NBA backlash by fiction nominee Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (also recently interviewed, along with the other fiction nominees, by Ron Hogan of Beatrice).