The O’Connor comes with a prize of €50,000, which converts to just over $60,000–twice the level of the Rea Award for the Short Story, which was announced at roughly the same time. Ann Beattie became the twentieth writer to receive the Rea, which doesn’t honor specific stories or even collected works, but seeks rather to point out “significant contribution(s) to the discipline of the short story as an art form” (on which basis Beattie’s been eligible ever since the prize was created in 1986). “Her prose has become known for its vivid particularity, the details of the way we live,” wrote jurors Sherman Alexie, Ron Carlson, and Tess Gallagher. “But her stories have insisted on their place in American letters because of her ability to imply the way the human heart confronts the confusion of attachment and loss.She approaches the intricacies of contemporary life,layered and frazzled as it is,in such a way that we accompany characters who sometimes find their lives softly caving in or imploding. There is a complexity in her best work that reveals new gradations of the oldest emotions.”

Meanwhile, the Mercantile Library is reinventing itself as a center “devoted entirely to the art of fiction,” and one of the first steps in the process is presenting Nan A. Talese with the newly created Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction. Talese, the senior veep at Doubleday who’s run her own imprint since 1990, has published a slew of great fiction writers, including (very selectively on my part) Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Atwood, Pat Conroy, Jennifer Egan, Aleksandar Hemon, Ian McEwan, and Barry Unsworth.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Like the Max Perkins Award (mentioned earlier today), this prize is part of the Mercantile Library’s big fall launch for its Center for Fiction. As executive director Noreen Tomassi puts it, “At a time when high-quality fiction is facing hard times, it is our intent to create the same energy and support network for fiction as those tireless advocates of poetry were able to develop in support of poetry” two decades ago. If Ben Marcus hears that, he’s probably going to be grinding his teeth more than a little bit–as I noted a few weeks back, Marcus thinks Franzen’s one of the worst possible candidates to play spokesman for literary culture and has devoted a lengthy, pointed Harper’s essay (partially online) to explaining why. In it, he describes Franzen indirectly as

“…the writer willing to sell short the aims of literature, to serve as its fuming, unwanted ambassador, to apologize for its excesses or near misses, its blind alleys, to insult the reading public with film-ready versions of reality and experience and inner sensations, scenes flying jauntily by under the banner of realism, which lately grants it full critical immunity.”

Considering that, as Marcus elaborates, Franzen finds James Joyce and William Gaddis overly “difficult,” it’ll be interesting to see if readers can figure out what he admires about Eustace Chisholm. The Mercantile’s press release does offer the tantalizing hint that Purdy’s fiction “reflects his obsession with exploitation and abuse of innocents, disjunctions within ordinary families, loneliness, and the mid-century’s subculture of homosexuality, sexual experimentation and depravity.” Apart from the “mid-century” tag, you could say that sounds like The Corrections, at least in a general sense…

Mind you, in the interest of disclosure, I’m not criticizing the selection by any means, nor would I be in much of a position to do so, since I was recently part of the litblog co-op trying to “draw attention to the best of contemporary fiction…in a flooded marketplace,” and we just picked an author who’d been profiled in the Times, too–deservedly so, I’d say.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

First up is satirist and neocon Christopher Buckley’s new novel BOOMSDAY, the premise described by Publishers Marketplace as “a fiery female activist opposed to Baby Boomer excess convinces the government to solve the Social Security crisis by offering Boomers incentives to kill themselves at retirement age.” Ouch. Controversial, but somehow apt…

Speaking of Christophers, Mr. Hitchens has not only hooked himself with a brand-spankin’ new agent — oh, some guy named Steve Wasserman — but also joined up with Twelve for his next rant-heavy work GOD IS NOT GREAT, which PM describes as “asserting that religion does more harm than good in the world, and aiming to show how society would benefit if faith remained personal rather than public.” This should definitely not surprise anyone familiar with the ways of the Hitch.

Finally, Karp picks up something a little quirkier: Julie Checkoway’s WAITING FOR HOCKNEY, the true story of a guy so obsessed with Marilyn Monroe that he devoted a decade of his life to creating a life-size blow-up doll of her, no matter that it upt him in debt for 250 grand.

So three down, nine to go — who will be next to join the Cult of Twelve?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“You know, I don’t generally stop to reflect, and am, to the exclusion of most other things, rather exhausted right now, all things considered, but I suspect that I’ll always look back on this week as being one of the especially good ones–it’s not every week that you have a big budget movie start shooting on the Monday… learn that your novel has gone to number one on the Times list on the Wednesday, and have the little film you made come out on the Friday. It’s got to be special.”

Filling in the blanks: the film that’s just started shooting is Beowulf (with Ray Winstone in the title role and Crispin Glover as Grendel), the one that’s coming out tomorrow is MirrorMask (the illustrated screenplay of which is suh-weet), and the book is Anansi Boys (which I’m taking with me on the plane this weekend, lucky me).

And if all that weren’t enough, last week he revealed that he’s still keeping a hand in the comics game, reinterpreting Jack Kirby’s Eternals. Most readers here probably aren’t comic book geeks, so let me just say: way cool.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you can’t make it in person, try to catch the webcast. Either way, it’s free.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Turns out, reports Jennifer Brett of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (and, the next day, Edward Wyatt), it wasn’t just the book. In Unlikely Angel, a memoir co-published today by HarperCollins subsidiaries Zondervan and Morrow, Ashley Smith (left) reveals that just before she kept kidnapper Brian Nichols up all night talking, she gave him the last of her crystal meth stash to get on his good side. She turned down his invitation to share the drugs, however, and writes that she’s remained clean since then. In an interview with Brett published today, Smith says, “I think everything I did was the way God wanted it to happen…The person who runs my life now is not Ashley. It’s Jesus. I don’t make a move without saying, ‘Guide me, lead me.’ I put others before myself now. It was just all about me. Now it’s about making a difference.”

photo: Rich Addicks/AJC

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Paris Hilton’s YOUR HEIRESS DIARY: Confess It All To Me, an opportunity for fans to channel their own inner heiress as Paris shows them how to get the most fun and excitement out of every single day, to Trish Todd at Touchstone/Fireside, by Dan Strone at Trident Media Group (world English).

Does “channelling my own inner heiress” include getting my Sidekick hacked and snaring Greek billionaire shipping magnet heirs for no good reason? Awesome!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The paperback publisher of Tom Wolfe’s unevenly reviewed latest novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is hoping that a dramatically redesigned cover–and a youth-oriented marketing campaign, complete with a contest featuring a trip to Cancun–will help draw young adults to the book, mocked by some reviewers who found the septuagenarian author’s accounts of campus sex life unconvincing.

Oddly, the cover of the paperback, omits the name of the novel altogether. “Big publicity and marketing campaigns for big authors are to be expected,” said Michael Cader, the editor of two industry publications, Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Lunch. But “a paperback cover that has the author’s name in huge letters and neglects to include the book’s title at all is very unexpected, and very unusual.”

Darin Keesler, marketing director of Picador USA, the novel’s paperback publisher, said that the decision to leave the title off the cover was partly a design issue, partly a nod to Wolfe’s fame. “We were able to do it because Tom Wolfe is in many ways a brand, a star.”

Well sure, but there’s one fundamental problem with this: the fabulous teen/college crowd that they want to market to? Most of them couldn’t care less who Tom Wolfe is. Why not leave his name off and just have it written by Charlotte Simmons?

Still, Picador has grand plans for the paperback tour, even if the description keeps causing me to giggle convulsively:

On Wednesday, Wolfe, 74, still plans to read from the novel at New York’s Cooper Union with Touré, a 34-year-old novelist and pop culture commentator who has worked for MTV and CNN and whose work Wolfe admires. (“He is–if you can imagine this–Oscar Wilde as street thug,” Wolfe said last May.)

Yeah, use that as a blurb there,Touré.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Uh-oh! Someone at Simon & Schuster publicity’s getting a friendly chuck on the arm for their awesomer-than-awesome product placement skills! (Who’s the man? You’re the man! Or the woman.)

Maybe she’ll have finished it by the end of her term.

Courtney Love Sentenced [Yahoo!/Reuters]

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“This event touches upon so many important issues that it deserves thoughtful treatment from someone, like Horne, who experienced it first hand and can vividly capture each moment, but also has the ability and access to provide the critical long view.”

It sounds like an excellent get for Bartlett–and in his first month at Random House, no less, demonstrating exactly why they wanted to hire him away from Oxford University Press (where he was a senior editor specializing in politics and current events). I for one am hoping he gets Horne to provide lots of detail on the heroic efforts of Times-Picayune staffers to keep the paper running as an online blog of breaking stories.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Though the Guardian‘s Sarah Crown makes the connection as she interviews Robinson about the book’s forthcoming sequel, Fifty Degrees Below, she winds up asking him more about the background science and the overall political tone, which just might be a satire of the Bush administration’s approach to climate change and science in general.

“‘Well, there is a bit of that,’ he admits [to her], ‘but it’s very hard to be funny about this stuff, except in the blackest sense.’”

(While we’re on the subject of sci-fi and reality intersecting, Reason has an intriguing essay about Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren as a prescient vision of New Orleans.)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

EdRants notes that Zadie Smith isn’t doing any more interviews:

yesterday afternoon, I received a voicemail from Cornell stating that “all interviews are canceled.” She didn’t state a reason and was very apologetic…[Smith's publicist] Cornell told me that Smith had been overscheduled and that she had been forced to cut back because she did not want to exhaust herself. The decision had come directly from Smith herself and Penguin supported the decision. But at the back of my mind, I wondered if the Kachka interview had something to do with Smith’s decision.

He goes on to conclude…

So what’s the answer? Possibly somewhere in between. Smith probably recalls that there was indeed a tangent, but may not recall the exact nature of said tangent. But if the question itself is, as Kachka states, a negative one (“What’s so bad about England?), then it’s small wonder that a negative response was given.

… seeming to imply that Boris Kachka (who is, full disclosure, an ex-colleague of mine) would have been in the wrong for asking a negative question which was hardly leading, given that she had just made remarks about England being disgusting. (If anything, it gave her an opening to soften them or take them back.) Sounds to me like Boris was doing his job. I don’t think it’s any journalist’s place to make sure the writer ends up with a flattering interview, or to encourage them to censor themselves. In a lot of the book blog coverage I’m reading, there seems to be an odd willingness to automatically defend the author as if the reporter has some responsibility to protect the author rather than to treat her as a subject.

There’s also a failure to recognize the fact that when press is unflattering, “I was misquoted” is a fairly common response, and in most cases, the reporter has much more to lose if that were in fact the case.

I also don’t think that Katcha’s comment here

Kachka also noted, rather ominously, “She doesn’t realize that when journalists come under suspicion, we have the tapes to prove it.”

was meant ominously (or threateningly,) as implied. In my experience, it’s a reality. It’s not unusual to have subjects claim that they were misquoted thinking that it’s just their word against the reporter’s and then backpedal furiously and apologize when they realize that the reporter has actual proof because the conversation was taped.

And there’s nothing “gotcha”-ish about an on-the-record, scheduled and premeditated interview. Having said stupid stuff myself and had it end up in the New York Times, I can sympathize with the pain of seeing your words in print and wishing you hadn’t said them. But at no point would I have blamed the reporter for them being there.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tonight’s reading features four great storytellers–James Salter, Jim Shepard, Julia Slavin, and Amy Hempel–plus a musical performance by Sam Bisbee. It starts at 8:00 p.m. at the Happy Ending bar at 302 Broome Street, just off Forsyth (one block north of the B/D stop at Grand Street or a few blocks from the F/J/M/Z at Delancey). If you can’t make it, but still want to contribute to Katrina relief efforts, the organizations on the Bomb list are among many worthwhile groups who need your help at this time. Also, Amazon.com’s Red Cross page has already raised $12.37 million and continues to accept your donations.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.