PEN: We’re Looking into This Nasdijj Thing

By Ron Hogan on February 2, 2006 2:42 PM

PEN has issued a statement concerning Tim Barrus a.k.a. Nasdijj—and apparently, in addition to the Beyond Margins award for “writers of color” he snagged for The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping that I mentioned this morning, he was also a finalist for the Martha Albrand Award for his debut memoir, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, a few years before that.

“If accurate, the allegations recently reported in LA Weekly suggest that neither of the submitted works was eligible for the PEN awards for which they were recognized,” a PEN spokewsoman wrote. “PEN deplores the misrepresentation apparently perpetrated in these two cases and regrets the recognition accorded these books by PEN’s literary awards process.” They’re looking into Nasdijj’s case right now, and in the future, they’ll ask publishers and authors to confirm their eligibility for any awards they’re in the running for.

I checked in with Sherman Alexie, who expressed his resigned attitude towards Nasdijj’s prolonged success earlier this week, because even though I knew he’d stopped trying to tell people about Nasdijj after Houghton Mifflin snubbed his warnings about The Blood, I thought maybe he might have said something to PEN about the Beyond Margins award at least. “Do you think the PEN folks would have believed me? I don’t think so,” he wrote back. Alexie is also perturbed by the “deafening silence from the media” over Nasdijj’s hoax compared to the endless fascination with James Frey: “Jeez, I can throw a rock in any random direction and hit a lying drunk… Nasdijj’s deception is historical, with long precedent, and it says something larger about the publishing industry.” For which Alexie has yet to receive an apology, in case you were wondering (and, yes, Houghton Mifflin, we’re looking at you, but it wouldn’t hurt for Esquire and Ballantine to say something nice, either).