• George Gurley reports on Monday's "Good Spell" spelling bee, which promised public humiliation for Jonathan Ames, James Frey, Heidi Julavits, Francine Prose, Lauren Weisberger, and other well-known-ish writers.

  "F-u-c-k," [Lev Grossman, book critic, Time magazine] said, after being asked to spell autochthonous - but he nailed it! Ms. Kuczynski [Sunday Styles writer, The New York Times] got "patronymics" - wrong! Mr. Grossman swiftly took care of it and went on to win decicively with "callipygian."
  
  ... "I'm really upset," [Kuczynski] said. "Because I know how to spell patronymics and some fuckhead in the last row said 'I'. F-u-c-k-h-e-a-d. I was surprised he got autochthonous. I'm depressed."

• Newsday looks at the growing popularity of multi-authored novels:

  A changing market has spurred dual authorship, she says, with more shelf space now devoted to "front list" or "franchise authors" and less to "midlist authors."
  
  Some of those non-bestsellers, she says, can earn more as co-authors and perhaps get a leg up on their own next contract, as she hopes will happen to her friend Charlotte Hughes, whom she met in 1989 when both were fledgling romance writers.
  
  The first book of their new series, "Full House," based on an early novel by Evanovich but expanded by Hughes, has only Evanovich's name on the front. A letter on the back explains the liaison. In the next three, including the most recent, "Full Blast," Hughes' name, smaller than Evanovich's, makes the cover.

• Hoping poetry might finally find an audience, Swedes beam poetry into outer space. The transmission Tuesday night was aimed at the star Vega, about 25 light years away.
  
  
• Steve Kloves, who adapted the first four Harry Potter books for the big screen, "has opted to step away from the series" to adapt and direct Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, another Warner Bros. project.
  
  
• "Later this month," the Guardian writes, "Lee Whitnum, an ex-girlfriend of John Kerry's, will publish a semi-autobiographical novel about her time with the Massachusetts senator. We imagine a sneak preview."

• Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil and Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness took home the Governor General's literary awards in non-fiction and fiction, respectively. Offering an unintended comparison of the Canadian and American literary climates, GG drama winner Morris Panych told the Toronto Star, "I honestly didn't think I was going to get it this time around, because this [The Girl In The Goldfish Bowl] was a very accessible piece and sometimes you get punished for popularity."
  
  
• The British have the Booker; the Italians, the Premio Strega; and the French -- well, too many national awards to choose from. The Germans, however, still lack their own media-friendly national prize, a situation they're now trying to rectify. But, warns the Guardian, "the recent history of literary prizes suggests they are not without difficulty." Furthermore: "Anyone expecting a literary prize to encourage either great literature or learned debate is doomed to disappointment."
  
  
• The Portland Tribune, writing on the Oregon Book Awards, attributes the "secret hope" of the awards to a Martin Amis quote: "... When a British writer wins an award, he gets a new typewriter. When an American writer wins an award, he gets a new life."
  
  
• Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L'Engle, and fourteen others received the National Medal of Arts yesterday. "This is the happiest day in my life," Bradbury told the Washington Post as he sat by a window in the Blue Room of the White House. Gesturing towards the Washington Monument, he continued, "I started from nothing. It was a long haul and now I'm here."

THE CONTROVERSY
Perhaps not realizing that an "obscure woman writer from New York City" would actually win the National Book Award, the media, cowed by Lily Tuck's new honor, at last relays the controversy's "other side." From the Reuters write-up:

Brushing off such criticism at a reading by the finalists the night before the awards, National Book Foundation trustee Quang Bao said literary criticism had for too long been the preserve of old men writing about books written by old men.

"This is not a popularity contest, it's not about who sold the most ... this is a writer to writer award," he said, noting that the judging panels were all made up of authors.

The LA Times, meanwhile, reports the thoughts of nominee Joan Silber -- "It seems odd that there would be a debate about the rights of the unrecognized to be recognized" -- and of local bookstore owner Doug Dutton: "At a certain point you have to wonder if anyone hasn't bought the Roth book yet ... What a wonderful thing to see five interesting, different writers who aren't literary household names."

USA Today includes host Garrison Keillor's stance as well: "Controversy is all to the good. The National Book Award is a big deal, especially to a young writer. If there were no controversy, it would mean no one cared."

Edward Wyatt, however, writing his third NY Times piece on the NBA, can't resist taking one small pot-shot at winner Lily Tuck -- or, more precisely, Tuck's touted "imagination":

Rick Moody, the chairman of the panel of judges who chose the winner and the four other finalists, called [Tuck's The News from Paraguay] a novel of "astonishing quality" that incorporates a rich mixture of language and imagination.

The imagination portion in particular was evident when, in her acceptance remarks, Ms. Tuck confessed that she had never been to Paraguay and did not intend to go.

"I've often been asked, 'Why Paraguay?' " Ms. Tuck told an audience of about 600 people at the Marriott Marquis in Midtown Manhattan. "I don't have an answer," she said, although she admitted that it did allow her to exercise her penchant for writing about "stuff that most people don't know about" and satisfied her "need to teach or instruct."

"It gives me an edge," she added.

HONORING BLUME
The various reports give the impression that a) Blume's acceptance speech was a tad repetitive, or b) tape recorders were banned from the ceremony. "Being able to think for yourself is the best part of a moral education," the LA Times reports Blume saying. "So it makes me sad that for some people, thinking for yourself is considered subversive." But in the NY Times, we find this varient: "It makes me sad and angry that encouraging young people to think for themselves makes you subversive."

PW Newsline notes that "Judy Blume's speech lacked the punch of Stephen King's last year," most likely a good thing: "no exhortations to read favorite authors and no pointed explications of how the writer once suffered in poverty."

Instead, she gave a more genial explanation of how she started writing as a twentysomething mother in Elizabeth, N.J., and also shared some comical responses to her books from child readers ("Please send the facts of life, in numbered order") and adult ones (You are "rude, crude...vexed, perplexed and oversexed. When can we have lunch?")

... As for advice on how she was able to define a genre and rewriting publishing rules: "Not knowing anything about writing or publishing helped."

Blume's speech, according to the NY Times, was preceded by a reading from Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Abby Boyle, whose father, Kevin Boyle, later took home the nonfiction prize. (If that seems a suspicious choice of readers -- a cute child, at the last moment, trotted out before the judges -- Beatrice's Ron assures us the choice was well-intended. "The Foundation had called [Kevin] about a week after he'd asked if it was okay to bring his two daughters to the ceremony and asked if [Abby would] like to read ...")

ETC.
After all that fuss about who - and how many - would attend the ceremony on behalf of The 9/11 Commission Report, it must have been a disappointment for Norton's two tables when the Report failed to even make the nonfiction presenter's list of nominees. PW Newline notes "an alert Harold Augenbraun, the NBF executive director, stood up to remind the said presenter." PW continues, "A minute later the book didn't win, limits now clearly drawn around the statement made by its nomination."

Also noted by PW: "The awards marked what could be called a changing of the guard, if only for one year."

Random House and FSG, who before tonight had won five of the last eight awards handed out and published seven of the 16 books to win this decade, went away empty-handed. Instead, HarperCollins took its first prize since Homeless Bird won the Young People's in 2000, and Holt its first since 1999, the year When Zachary Beaver Came to Town scored in the same category.

First came The Rules, the book by two American women that promised to deliver "time-tested secrets for capturing the heart of Mr Right". Now, three British friends - Fiona McCade, William O'Leary and Cath Sutton - have come up with The Questions, an altogether more direct way of discovering whether friends and would-be lovers are truly compatible.

Every question - whether it relates to philosophy, history, TV sitcoms or junk food - offers a simple either/or choice. Do you prefer Monopoly or Scrabble? Follow Freud or Jung? "Don't know" or "don't care" are not acceptable answers ...

The Telegraph's description of The Questions: 101 Ways to Sort the Pearls from the Swine (followed by an excerpt asking "Nigella or Delia?" and "Jaffa: cake or biscuit?") makes the book seem -- more than a quirky descendent of the Rules -- a mealy, Britishized, standardized test version of Chuck Klosterman's romantic questionnaire in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which Happy Grrls Online described like this:

The aptly titled "hypothetical interlude" (which precedes a chapter titled "Being Zack Morris") is simply a list of questions Klosterman asks anyone he meets in order to decide if he really loves them. And after reading these silly but loaded questions, I think a part of me fell in love with Klosterman.[*] An excerpt from this list: "At long last, someone invents the 'dream VCR.' This machine allows you to tape an entire evening's worth of your won dreams, which you can then watch at your leisure. However, the inventor of the dream VCR will only allow you to use this device if you agree to a strange caveat: when you watch your dreams, you must do so with your family and closest friends in the same room. They get to watch your dreams along with you. And if you don't agree to this, you can't use the dream VCR. Would you still do this?"

*Strangely, it consistently produces that effect in women.