Ooh, to be Horace Engdahl this morning…

Engdahl is secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group responsible for selecting literary Nobel Prize winners. In a recent interview, as reported by the Independent, Engdahl referred to American literature as “isolated” and “insular”, further stating: “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world.”

Did he really...?

He did, and the backlash has begun. New Yorker editor David Remnick is having a go, as is Harold Augenbraum, director of the US National Book Foundation. “I’ll send him a reading list,” Augenbraum is quoted as saying. (That’s my kind of threat.)

The larger issue here is the Nobel selection process, and just what US authors are supposed to assume upon hearing such grand dismissal from a key figure on the selection committee. An American author has not taken home a Nobel Prize for literature since Toni Morrison in 1993; Engdahl started on the prize committee just four years later… connection?

The latest winner will be annouced next week. Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth are said to be frontrunners. From the sounds of things, with all books in contention surely well and truly finished by Engdahl and his committee, the pair might rethink writing those just-in-case acceptance speeches. 

—Nikki Tranter

The Internet is alight with the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. This is hitting me hard, not only because of Wallace’s youth, talent, and unfinished business, but because of my sense that he was not the type of artist who did this. In his writing, and especially in his magazine writing, I always found an authenticity and decency and all-around avoidance of self-tortured preening. I’m not saying we can spot suicidal hints in an artist’s work, but I am saying Wallace connected to real emotions and real concerns in a way that separated him from many of his pomo peers.

This doesn’t feel like the time to track down who broke the news, but I found out via the LA Times‘s blog. In choosing an image to accompany the story, their reporter posted the wrong book cover—not of Wallace’s opus, Infinite Jest, but of Stephen Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide, a short volume in the “Continuum Contemporaries” series.

The Times‘ unintentional slip feels like a fitting sort of tribute—with possible implications for Wallace’s style and audience, his relationship to academia, and even the state of fiction today—but I don’t feel like parsing it. I just feel sad.

—Craig Fehrman

Imagine if you got to do this at primary school!

The good teachers at Parkdale School in Edmonton gave their students $25 each and let them run wild at a Chapter’s bookstore this week to help replenish the school’s library. Students from kindergarten up to ninth grade selected dinosaur books, ca magazines, and even a few Stephen King paperbacks. All up, the kids nabbed 410 books.

The Edmonton Journal reports that Parkdale is an “inner-city school that puts extra emphasis on literacy and writing”. My favourite bit of the article is this: “The field trip ended up being part literature lesson, part math class. With a price limit, students had to figure out each book’s Canadian price and how much money they had left. Some, with a few dollars left over, opted to pool their money with a friend and get an extra book.”

Can’t you just see the kids getting together and working out what coins would buy which books, like they were swapping marbles in the playground?

—Nikki Tranter

”I’m Sheila Heti, and I’m going to be reading a story called “The Princess and the Plumber” while having sex with my boyfriend ... Do you mind if we have sex while I read this? We’ll just do it ... slowly.”

And then Heti’s boyfriend proceeds to become cutely inflamed that his girlfriend has thrown away his sour dough. An argument breaks out: He was gonna eat it… She’ll buy him some more… It was perfectly good, he checked it this morning…

Do they end up having sex to the plumber story? You’ll have to buy the CD to find out. I might have to, too. Sex and a good book? That actually sound like my idea of pre-lights off bliss.

Can I say only at McSweeney’s? The upscale literary firm continues to change the way we look at and listen to our stories with its second audio collection, this one titled “Sweet Nothings and Essential Slow Jams”. This time, McSweeney’s authors including Heti, Ben Ehrenreich, Tony DeSouza, Chris Bachelder, and Pia Ehrhardt read stories featuring tales of best first dates.

Don’t expect, though, these stories to rival Danielle Steel with lusty grabs and longing dialogue. DeSouza writes about man-tree love, Heti’s story features talking frogs, and Ehrenreich’s is, so says the press release, a “post-apocalyptic love triangle between a man, a woman, and a giant squid”.

The stories are available in MP3 format from eMusic.com.

—Nikki Tranter

As this Guardian article points out, that’s favourite writer. Not favourite children’s writer or young adult writer, but writer. In front of Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkein, Beatrix Potter, and J.K. Rowling. Blyton authored more than 800 books throughout her 50-year career including the Famous Five series and The Magic Faraway Tree. This new honour comes courtesy of the Costa Book Awards people and a poll of more than 2,000 adult readers.

Lucy Mangan at the Guardian explores Blyton’s life and work, and gets to the bottom of her enduring popularity:

I myself can barely bring myself to talk about my Enid Blyton years. Who wants to let daylight in upon magic? From the age of about seven to nine (I deduce from publication dates on my beloved paperbacks, bought from WHSmith by the yard by my parents and shovelled towards the ravenous prepubescent bibliophile welded to the farthest corner of the sofa), I consumed the Famous Five, Secret Seven, Mallory Towers, St Clare’s, the Five Find-Outers and Dog and Island/Castle/Valley/Sea/Any Other Concrete Noun Adventure series. They went down whole and never touched the sides. Milly Molly Mandy, The Worst Witch, Teddy Robinson, Maggie Gumption, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark - they had been good. Blyton was better.

The Telegraph reports on Blyton’s honour. Columnist Rowan Pelling takes a closer look into just how the author “colonised childhood’s most innate comfort zones” in order to directly affect her audience: 

Blyton’s Adventure series is one of my guilty pleasures and, of a winter’s afternoon, I can still be found curled up with Jack, Lucy-Ann, Philip, Dinah and Kiki the parrot as they are abducted in an aeroplane, or uncover an ancient treasure map.

Information about Blyton and her books can be found at http://www.enidblyton.net/. The Costa Book Awards site features a press release on the recent poll, which includes a complete list of Britain’s 50 favourite authors.

—Nikki Tranter

Got a spare 30 minutes? Head over to the Mail Online for the most delicious read of the week: a long excerpt from Christopher Ciccone’s Life with My Sister Madonna. Just make sure those 30 minutes really are spare, because once you start, you won’t stop. This is first-class juice. And not the sort of Andrew Morton, third-party, he’s-full-of-crap juice. This is horses mouth stuff! It’s like Rupert Everett’s book all over again. Sure, it’s slanted, but if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be so damned enthralling.

Chris on Guy Ritchie:

Guy’s pride in his own heterosexuality swells noticeably when he’s in the presence of a gay man like me. And in his wedding week, with these after-dinner toasts seemingly aimed at underscoring his overt masculinity, he is in his element. I, however, am far from amused when many of the speeches trumpeting Guy’s heterosexuality include the word ‘poofter’, a derogatory British expression for gay.

Chris on the Madonna Mythology:

She is a middle-class girl who propagates the story that she landed in Times Square with just a pair of ballet shoes and $35 to her name. But that’s pure mythology and the further she progresses, the more mythological her life story becomes ... Far from being this lost and friendless little waif who didn’t even have a crust of dry bread to eat, when Madonna went to New York she had money in her pocket, plenty of contacts and a support system all in place.

Chris on “Mrs. Ritchie”:

In August 2002, Madonna invites me to her birthday party at Roxbury. The invitation is from ‘Mrs Ritchie’. When she was married to Sean, she never called herself Mrs Penn. Now she has relinquished practically the most famous name in the universe—just to make Guy feel better about himself.

So, you can see, he’s not pulling any punches. He doesn’t so much out his sister as a vicious bitch, but more a confused woman who’s spent so much time trying to remain relevant through so-called re-invention that she might not really know who she is. Ciccone appears to want to let us in on just how a tough-talking all-American chick from Detroit who represented individuality and personal freedom became an English castle dweller with fancy cutlery and a bigoted husband. This is the “great tale” he has to tell, Ciccone told Good Morning America. It’s not about revenge, he reckons, but revelation.

ABC Online also has a story up about Ciccone’s book. In it a family therapist is consulted to help us understand where Ciccone is coming from with his unflattering stories. The bottom line? Envy, as if we didn’t know. Marshall is quoted: “If [Ciccone] was on the Madonna gravy train and she cut him off, he could feel like he’s going to get his no matter what, one way or the other ... When people operate at primitive levels and get their feelings hurt or nose out of joint, they always want the other person to pay for making them feel neglected or like a failure.”

Either way, it is a great story. It’s all perception, though, and until Madonna has a go at her own book, it’s the best we’ve got. I wonder, though, if Madonna’s not secretly thrilled about the book, considering I haven’t cared about anything she’s done since “Cherish” and here I am reading about her, blogging about her, pondering her life choices. She’s relevant again and she hasn’t lifted a finger!

—Nikki Tranter