from Prospect Magazine

Roget’s Thesaurus is more than just a book about words—and the story of its author’s often unhappy life provides a suggestive counterpoint to its complexities
Lesley Chamberlain  

Peter Mark Roget, the future Linnaus of the English word, began compiling word-lists at the age of eight. Why was he not playing with other children, honing his social skills? The problem was his mother, a widow at 28, who drained her son of sympathy. Catherine Romilly gave birth to a wonderful, handsome, talented boy , but couldn’t let him be himself.Independence, he would write in his Thesaurus under list 744, equals freedom of action, unilaterality; freedom of choice, initiative. But for freedom see also non-liability, disobedience, seclusion and liberation: the way one insists on freedom in the face of opposition.

Catherine Roget née Romilly came from a well-regarded and successful London Huguenot family blighted by mental illness. After the early death of her Swiss-born husband, Catherine never recovered her capacity for normal life. Her own mother had been mentally incapable and Catherine slipped inexorably into a lesser version of her mother’s state. Shlepping with his sister backwards and forwards between London and the country on the wheels of maternal restlessness, Peter never felt he had a home, except in his wordlists. He worked on them in solitude, while qualifying as a doctor. 

Fully fledged at 20, five years too young to practise, he was exceptionally able and also peculiar and solitary. He hated disorder and dirt. When he took a job accompanying two rich teenagers on their European Grand Tour, their notebooks revealed his crabbed and pernickety mind. He taught them to count the windows in cathedrals, and visitor numbers, and tally how many paintings were in a collection. He taught them to structure the world prosaically and reliably; at all costs to avoid emotional surrender. His response to both human and natural life was to classify it, the foundation of his great work to come.

[ click to continue reading at The Prospect ]

from MSNBC

Federal agents recover ‘Hitler’ bookmark

Romanian man arrested trying to sell item to undercover officers 

updated 3:45 p.m. MT, Wed., Nov. 26, 2008

SEATTLE - Authorities have recovered a stolen 18-carat gold bookmark that reportedly was given to Adolf Hitler by his longtime mistress, Eva Braun.

Christian Popescu, a Romanian national, was arrested Tuesday outside a suburban Starbucks after trying to sell the bookmark to an undercover agent for $100,000, according to papers filed in U.S. District Court.

Federal prosecutors said the bookmark was among several items taken in an auction-house heist in Madrid six years ago. At the time, some antiquities experts questioned its authenticity.

[ click to read at MSNBC.com ]

from The Guardian UK

Bad sex award exposes this year’s nominees

Alastair Campbell among Literary Review’s nominees for the year’s worst erotic writing

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 20 2008 15.12 GMT
• Article history

‘Slightly tortuous’: Alastair Campbell. Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Alastair Campbell’s depiction of a gauche sexual encounter in his debut novel All in the Mind has won him a place on the shortlist for the literary world’s most dreaded honour: the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.

Campbell would join luminaries including Tom Wolfe, AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Melvyn Bragg if he wins the award – a plaster foot - on November 25 at London’s aptly named In and Out club. Run by the Literary Review, the bad sex awards were set up by Auberon Waugh “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”.

The former spin doctor may take heart from the implication that his debut is an “otherwise sound literary novel”. Campbell of course has some earlier practice in depicting sex, having written pornography for Forum magazine under the pseudonym the Riviera Gigolo early in his career, but a passage set on a bench has catapulted Campbell onto the list: “He wasn’t sure where his penis was in relation to where he wanted it to be, but when her hand curled around it once more, and she pulled him towards her, it felt right,” Campbell writes. “Then as her hand joined the other on his neck and she started making more purring noises, now with little squeals punctuating them, he was pretty sure he was losing his virginity.”

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from Shelf-Awareness

Library of Dust photographed by David Maisel (Chronicle Books, $80, 9780811863339/0811863336, September 2008)

This is definitely a big gift book, measuring almost 18″ x 14″, which is a display challenge, but worth it. In 1913, Oregon State Hospital in Salem, a psychiatric hospital, began cremating the remains of deceased patients not claimed by next of kin. This practice remained until 1971, and David Maisel received permission to photograph the copper canisters containing the ashes of these patients. He also documented the building: paint peeling off the walls in Room 3, Hallway 2, Ward 66, J Building; a fragile sepia-toned letter from Ward 66; a 16-point star cut from a newspaper; tubs and plumbing pipes, cold and grim; a gurney with wide hanging straps. The canisters are extraordinary, having undergone chemical reactions with the ashes and the atmosphere, resulting in a harsh beauty. Burnished copper with green-blue corrosion and white rime. Malachite greens with a lichen-like patina on bent, dented and numbered containers. There are Rorschachs in mineral salts–a bed, an island, a Munchian scream. Or the world from an astronaut’s vantage, frost-like against vibrant blue. They form geographies of the soul, of lives lost to madness and neglect limned in magenta and rose. The urns were available to be photographed only because they were unclaimed–what dramatic or commonplace stories are held in these cans? “The minerals did form . . . rather quickly–is if forsaken souls could hardly wait to pass into another realm.”

[ click to read at Shelf Awareness ]

from the New York Times

When a Real-Life Killing Sent Two Future Beats in Search of Their Voices

Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust

William S. Burroughs, left, and Jack Kerouac in 1953.

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The best thing about this collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is its gruesomely comic title: “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire.

The novel itself, a sort of murder mystery written in 1945 when the authors were unpublished and unknown, is a flimsy piece of work — repetitious, flat-footed and quite devoid of any of the distinctive gifts each writer would go on to develop on his own.

The two authors take turns telling their story in alternating chapters. Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war (“There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark”); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of “On the Road,” none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work.

Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs’s famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of “Naked Lunch.” In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress.

The plot of “Hippos” stems from a much discussed real-life killing involving two men who were friends of both Burroughs and Kerouac. As James W. Grauerholz, Burroughs’s literary executor, explains in an afterword: “The enmeshed relationship between Lucien Carr IV and David Eames Kammerer began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1936, when Lucien was 11 and Dave was 25. Eight years, five states, four prep schools and two colleges later, that connection was grown too intense, those emotions too feverish.”

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from MSNBC

In the book world, the rarest of the rare

Would you pay $25 million for a Bible? 

By Philipp Harper

Every passion has its Holy Grail, and rare-book collecting is no exception.

Ask a group of bibliophiles to identify the rarest of all rare books,  and a majority probably would cite the Gutenberg Bible of 1456, the first book ever printed.

Assuming a collector could find a complete first-edition Bible, which had a run of several hundred copies, he could expect to pay anywhere from $25 million to $35 million, says rare-book expert Kenneth Gloss, proprietor of Brattle Book Shop in Boston.

Gloss, a well-known appraiser who has appeared on PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow,” bases his estimate on the fact that a single volume of the two-volume Gutenberg set sold for $5.5 million about 25 years ago. Today, single pages from first-edition Bibles fetch $25,000 each.

Anyone who can afford to invest in the top end of the antiquarian market generally will do very well. Consider, for example:

• A first edition of the collected works of Shakespeare published in 1623 sold not long ago for more than $6 million, a record price for the Bard’s works.
• The collection of Leonardo Da Vinci manuscripts that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates paid $30 million for more than 25 years ago now may be worth as much as $100 million, Gloss estimates.

Old books from the New World
While anything printed in the United States is of comparatively recent vintage, that hasn’t prevented demand for rare American works from going through the roof, too.

The most precious of the lot is a first-edition copy of the Declaration of Independence, several hundred of which were printed in Philadelphia for distribution throughout the Colonies after the original handwritten document was signed by the Founding Fathers. Though the copies did not bear signatures, the last one to come to market sold to television mogul Norman Lear for a cool $8 million.

Other items have seen their value build slowly through the years. Edgar Allen Poe’s first published poem, “Tamerlane,” is a case in point. Originally printed in 1827, the poem’s byline read “By a Bostonian.” It didn’t fare well with the reading public in large part, Gloss says, because “actually it was pretty horrible.”

The fact that its affiliation with Poe is obscured by its vague byline has given the poem a certain cachet as a hidden treasure to be bought cheap from unwitting sellers and then sold high to knowledgeable buyers. The latest instance of this occurred about a decade ago when a sharp-eyed collector bought the volume off a dealer’s $15 table and then turned around and sold it for $198,000.

[ click to read full article at MSNBC.com ]

from National Public Radio

The Making Of A Posthumous Best-Seller

by Martha Woodroof

NPR.org, November 11, 2008 ·The Girl with the Dragon Tattoois an unlikely best-seller — it’s the first book in a trilogy of thrillers written by Stieg Larsson, a previously unknown Swedish journalist who died of a heart attack in 2004.

“It’s a multigeneration family saga. It’s a story of corporate corruption, of religious fanaticism. It’s about the darker elements in contemporary society,” says [Knopf Editor-in-Chief “Sonny”] Mehta. “And then, at its basic level, it’s a kind of a classic locked-room mystery.”

Larsson’s day job was as a crusading anti-fascist journalist who was passionate in his support of anyone being victimized. He co-founded a magazine in Sweden called Expo. Daniel Poohl, a colleague at the magazine, calls Larsson “idealistic.”

“[I] never met anyone like him,” says Poohl. “I read the book after he died … it was … a way to hear Stieg’s voice again.”

The American edition of the novel sports enthusiastic blurbs from such best-selling authors as Michael Connelly, Lee Child and Harlan Coben. And there’s also one from Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient.

“Michael Ondaatje was in the office some months ago and saw it lying around, took a copy with him to a holiday in Hawaii or something, and then phoned me and said, ‘Who is this guy? What an absolutely wonderful read!’ ” Mehta says.

[ click to read full article at NPR.org ]

from the New York Times

A Genial Explorer of Literary Worlds

By A. O. SCOTT

My literary education was feverish and haphazard. From later childhood through the end of adolescence, from Jimmy Carter to the first George Bush, I schooled myself by snatching novels from my parents’ shelves, haunting the stacks at the local public library, and clawing through boxes of dry-rotted Penguins and Bantams at yard sales. Those books formed a life raft, a tool kit, a compendium of clues about what the world might look like and how a person might live in it. Like many other restless, bookish young souls, I read ravenously and indiscriminately, until over time patterns started to emerge, half-occult links between one volume and the next.

The name John Leonard was one of these links. The works of fiction that seemed to contain the most galvanizing news of the world — the ones that disclosed entire undreamed-of universes within their pages — all seemed to bear this man’s endorsement on their front or back covers. Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Don DeLillo, Grace Paley, V. S. Naipaul: writers like these were drawing a new global map of literary possibility, and John Leonard, more than any other critic, was assisting in the cartography, pointing readers toward freshly liberated zones of imagination. He spoke in the voice not of disembodied authority, but of enthusiasm.

I tracked his byline to the pages of this newspaper, and then to the first few issues of the reborn Vanity Fair, which at the time (the early 1980s) was devoting more of its pages to the likes of Mr. García Márquez and Mr. Naipaul than to the collected young blondes of Hollywood. It might have been on the fourth or fifth rereading of one of Mr. Leonard’s essays in that magazine — I think it was his long, sharp and generous consideration of William F. Buckley, who two decades before had published some of Mr. Leonard’s earliest writing in National Review — that a long-held intimation blossomed into conscious thought. Wow, I said to myself, I wish I could write like that.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from E! Online

from National Public Radio

by Henry Alford

Wisdom For The Ages In ‘Tao Te Ching’ 

All Things Considered,November 3, 2008 · 

When I tell people that I like to read theTao Te Ching, they start staring at the floor, as if looking for a dog to pet. It’s like I’ve suddenly produced, and then struck, a 4,000-pound gong.

But the thing is, the Tao Te Ching is one of the least ooey-wooey books about religion or philosophy I’ve ever read. And what this collection of aphorisms probably written in the 6th century B.C. has to offer is a series of useful and penetrating thoughts on a wide range of topics.

Of government, the Tao Te Ching says: “To rule a country, one must act with care, as when frying a small fish.”

Of humility, it says: “He who is noncompetitive invites no competition.”

Of leadership, it says: “The existence of the leader who is wise is barely known to those he leads.”

Fairly straightforward, right? I mean, it’s not like its predecessor the I Ching, which at one point counsels, “Deliver yourself from your great toe.” There are no great toes in theTao Te Ching, only great thoughts.

Which is why, despite the fact that I’m agnostic, suspicious of New Age claptrap and, yes, vaguely embarrassed by my pronunciation of this book’s title, I find myself returning to the Tao Te Ching time after time.

Part of what fuels me here is what I’ll call the book’s problem — namely, some readers think the Tao Te Ching promotes passivity. When the book states, “The greatest carver does the least carving,” maybe it’s just advocating something along the lines of “Less is more.”

[ click to continue reading at NPR.org ]

from USA Today

USA TODAY’s best-selling books of last 15 years 

Check the list for your favorite books. 

MORE: Best-Selling Books list turns 15 years of pages of top sellers

USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books List Top 150 books of the last 15 years (Oct. 28, 1993 through Oct. 23, 2008)
Rank	Title	Author
1	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone	J.K. Rowling
2	Dr. Atkins‘ New Diet Revolution	Robert C. Atkins
3	The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown
4	Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows	J.K. Rowling
5	Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix	J.K. Rowling
6	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince	J.K. Rowling
7	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets	J.K. Rowling
8	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	J.K. Rowling
9	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	J.K. Rowling
10	Who Moved My Cheese?	Spencer Johnson
11	The South Beach Diet	Arthur Agatston
12	Tuesdays With Morrie	Mitch Albom
13	Angels & Demons	Dan Brown
14	What to Expect When You’re Expecting	Heidi Murkoff, Arlene Eisenberg, Sandee Hathaway
15	The Purpose-Driven Life	Rick Warren
16	The Five People You Meet in Heaven	Mitch Albom
17	The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People	Stephen R. Covey
18	The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini
19	Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus	John Gray
20	The Secret	Rhonda Byrne
21	Rich Dad, Poor Dad	Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter
22	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
23	Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff	Richard Carlson
24	The Secret Life of Bees	Sue Monk Kidd
25	Eat, Pray, Love	Elizabeth Gilbert
26	Twilight	Stephenie Meyer
27	The Notebook	Nicholas Sparks
28	The Memory Keeper’s Daughter	Kim Edwards
29	The Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger
30	Memoirs of a Geisha	Arthur Golden
31	A New Earth	Eckhart Tolle
32	Oh, the Places You’ll Go!	Dr. Seuss
33	The Four Agreements	Don Miguel Ruiz
34	Angela’s Ashes	Frank McCourt
35	The Lovely Bones	Alice Sebold
36	Body-for-Life	Bill Phillips, Michael D’Orso
37	New Moon	Stephenie Meyer
38	Night	Elie Wiesel, translations by Marion Wiesel and Stella Rodway
39	Chicken Soup for the Soul	Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen
40	The Greatest Generation	Tom Brokaw
41	Breaking Dawn	Stephenie Meyer
42	The Celestine Prophecy	James Redfield
43	Wicked	Gregory Maguire
44	Good to Great	Jim Collins
45	Eclipse	Stephenie Meyer
46	Eragon	Christopher Paolini
47	Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood	Rebecca Wells
48	Your Best Life Now	Joel Osteen
49	In the Kitchen With Rosie	Rosie Daley
50	Simple Abundance	Sarah Ban Breathnach
51	A Child Called It	Dave Pelzer
52	A Million Little Pieces	James Frey
53	The Testament	John Grisham
54	Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul	Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Kimberly Kirberger
55	Deception Point	Dan Brown
56	The Alchemist	Paulo Coelho
57	Marley & Me	John Grogan
58	Dr. Atkins’ New Carbohydrate Gram Counter	Robert C. Atkins
59	Life of Pi	Yann Martel
60	The Brethren	John Grisham
61	The South Beach Diet Good Fats Good Carbs Guide	Arthur Agatston
62	The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town	John Grisham
63	For One More Day	Mitch Albom
64	The Polar Express	Chris Van Allsburg
65	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald
66	The Last Lecture	Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow
67	What to Expect the First Year	Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi Murkoff, Sandee Hathaway
68	Love You Forever	Robert Munsch, art by Sheila McGraw
69	Green Eggs and Ham	Dr. Seuss
70	A Painted House	John Grisham
71	The Rainmaker	John Grisham
72	Skipping Christmas	John Grisham
73	Cold Mountain	Charles Frazier
74	The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time	Mark Haddon
75	Life Strategies	Phillip C. McGraw
76	Seabiscuit: An American Legend	Laura Hillenbrand
77	The Summons	John Grisham
78	Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil	John Berendt
79	The Hobbit	J.R.R. Tolkien
80	The Runaway Jury	John Grisham
81	Goodnight Moon Board Book	Margaret Wise Brown, art by Clement Hurd
82	The Perfect Storm	Sebastian Junger
83	Snow Falling on Cedars	David Guterson
84	The Giver	Lois Lowry
85	Embraced by the Light	Betty J. Eadie
86	The Chamber	John Grisham
87	You: On A Diet	Michael F. Roizen, Mehmet C. Oz
88	The Prayer of Jabez	Bruce Wilkinson
89	Holes	Louis Sachar
90	Digital Fortress	Dan Brown
91	The Shack	William P. Young
92	The Devil Wears Prada	Lauren Weisberger
93	Water for Elephants	Sara Gruen
94	A Thousand Splendid Suns	Khaled Hosseini
95	The Seat of the Soul	Gary Zukav
96	Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul	Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Jennifer Read Hawthorne, Marci Shimoff
97	The Partner	John Grisham
98	Lord of the Flies	William Golding
99	Eldest: Inheritance, Book II	Christopher Paolini
100	The Broker	John Grisham
101	The Street Lawyer	John Grisham
102	A Series of Unfortunate Events No. 1: The Bad Beginning	Lemony Snicket
103	The Poisonwood Bible	Barbara Kingsolver
104	Into the Wild	Jon Krakauer
105	The King of Torts	John Grisham
106	The Tipping Point	Malcolm Gladwell
107	The Horse Whisperer	Nicholas Evans
108	Hannibal	Thomas Harris
109	The Audacity of Hope	Barack Obama
110	Running With Scissors	Augusten Burroughs
111	The Glass Castle: A Memoir	Jeannette Walls
112	My Sister’s Keeper	Jodi Picoult
113	The Last Juror	John Grisham
114	The Devil in the White City	Erik Larson
115	Left Behind	Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins
116	America (The Book)	Jon Stewart and The Writers of The Daily Show
117	The Red Tent	Anita Diamant
118	John Adams	David McCullough
119	The Christmas Box	Richard Paul Evans
120	The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants	Ann Brashares
121	Sugar Busters!	H. Leighton Steward, Sam S. Andrews, Morrison C. Bethea, Luis A. Balart
122	Blink	Malcolm Gladwell
123	The Power of Now	Eckhart Tolle
124	90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life	Don Piper, Cecil Murphey
125	The Fellowship of the Ring	J.R.R. Tolkien
126	1776	David McCullough
127	The Bridges of Madison County	Robert James Waller
128	Where the Heart Is	Billie Letts
129	The Ultimate Weight Solution	Phillip C. McGraw
130	Protein Power	Michael R. Eades, Mary Dan Eades
131	Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul	Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Jennifer Read Hawthorne, Marci Shimoff
132	Into Thin Air	Jon Krakauer
133	Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides
134	Three Cups of Tea	Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin
135	You: The Owner’s Manual	Michael F. Roizen, Mehmet C. Oz
136	1,000 Places to See Before You Die: A Traveler’s Life List	Patricia Schultz
137	Self Matters	Phillip C. McGraw
138	She’s Come Undone	Wally Lamb
139	1984	George Orwell
140	The Chronicles of Narnia	C.S. Lewis
141	The Millionaire Next Door	Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko
142	The Other Boleyn Girl	Philippa Gregory
143	The Zone	Barry Sears, Bill Lawren
144	The Pilot’s Wife	Anita Shreve
145	The Lost World	Michael Crichton
146	Atonement	Ian McEwan
147	He’s Just Not That Into You	Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo
148	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury
149	The World Is Flat	Thomas L. Friedman
150	Cross	James Patterson

Which books are you surprised to see on the list? Which ones do you think are missing?

[ click to read at USA Today ]

from the Chicago Tribune

Studs Terkel dies

October 31, 2008 at 3:40 PM | Comments (0)

Chicago writer Studs Terkel died today at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

Studs Terkel  ©Nancy Crampton
All Rights Reserved

from the Arizona Republic

Hillerman, author of Navajo series, dies

Oct. 27, 2008 12:00 AM
Associated Press (photo and copy)

Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels and creator of two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes - Navajo police Officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee - died Sunday of pulmonary failure in Albuquerque. He was 83.

Hillerman’s commercial breakthrough was Skinwalkers, published in 1987 - the first time he put both characters and their divergent world views in the same book. It sold 430,000 hardcover copies, paving the way for A Thief of Time, which made several best-seller lists. In all, he wrote 18 books in the Navajo series. 

Hillerman wrote more than 30 books; the memoir, Seldom Disappointed; and books on the history and natural beauty of his beloved Southwest.

Hillerman is survived by his wife, Marie, and their six children.

[ click to read at AZCentral.com ]

from the Financial Times

French novelist wins Nobel literature prize

By Natalie Whittle

Published: October 9 2008 12:16 | Last updated: October 9 2008 14:14

The novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was yesterday awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He is the first French writer to win the title since Claude Simon in 1985.

JMG Le Clézio, as he is more commonly known, was born in Nice in 1940, and hails from a Breton family which emigrated to Mauritius in the 18th century. A peripatetic childhood took him from Nice to Nigeria and back again to his birthplace, where he finished his studies having begun an English literature degree at Bristol university in the late 1950s.

His first novel, Le Procès-Verbal (The Deposition), published in 1963, brought him immediate recognition, winning the Prix Renaudot. It is a nightmarish, experimental vision of insanity, as experienced by Adam Pollo, a student who loses his memory and subsequently his mind.

The Nobel laureate has since written more than 30 works of fiction, non-fiction and essays, including the novel Désert in 1980, which won the Grand Prix Paul-Morand, awarded by the Académie française.

Le Clézio, who has been writing since boyhood, was first seen as a literary wildcard, though his later work has been characterised by a softer approach to content and form. His latest novel, Ritournelle de la Faim (Gallimard), was published last week and is written in memory of his mother.

Le Clézio had been tipped to win the prize but was not the favourite. The more favourable odds had been given to the Italian writer Claudio Magris and the Syrian poet Adonis.

Perennial candidates from the US, including Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, had been all but discounted from the frontrunners, after the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, last week told the Associated Press that ’’Europe is still the centre of the literary world’’.

The US, he said, is “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.’’

Awarding the prize, the Academy praised Le Clézio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”.

At a speech Le Clézio gave in April in Seoul at the International Publishers Congress, he championed literature’s power to cross borders and enhance cultural understanding.

To prove this point, he imagined a world in which Gutenberg had not invented the printing press. The result, he said, would be “un monde fermé”, catastrophically unjust and unbalanced.

He also speculated that if the internet had existed in the Third Reich, Hitler might have been an easy target for ridicule, and so might not have come to power.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

[ click to read at FT.com ]

from the New York Observer

N+1, Now in T-Shirt Form

BY MATT HABER  

via nplusonemag.com The Sartorial Situation

Just in time for fall semester, n+1, the Brooklyn-based journal of prose combat, has a new line of T-shirts. (Hey, The New York Review of Books sells Illuminated Pocket Magnifiers, okay?)

While we’re somewhat surprised they’re not referred to as “Cotton Monuments,” the shirts do come in two colors: socialist red and existentialist black. The Times A.O. Scott might say these unisex American Apparel shirts, “sometimes display a certain pained 21st-century ambivalence about the culture they inhabit.” They’re also limited edition and come in five sizes. (”Note: women may want to buy a size down.”)

In case you’re wondering, the shirts are modeled by writer