February 28, 2008
this is pretty cool. link to the full break down below. The 2008 Tournament of Books Artistic awards are like wet kisses from your Aunt Mabel. You should be gracious when you get one, but actually seeking one out is kind of unseemly. And yet every year, our most esteemed, and especially elderly, writers crank out novel with important theme after novel with important theme in the desperate pursuit of the Pulitzer or National Book Award or Nobel. And then a bunch of guys in a conference room halfway around the world go ahead and give the thing to Doris Lessing. (Like the Nobel committee, I too once pretended to understand what Canopus in Argos was all about.) Anyway, it’s enough to make Philip Roth cry and we are not in favor of anything that makes Philip Roth cry, which is why we are also against the unexamined values of the middle class and the songs of Harry Chapin. [more]

this is pretty cool. link to the full break down below. The 2008 Tournament of Books

Artistic awards are like wet kisses from your Aunt Mabel. You should be gracious when you get one, but actually seeking one out is kind of unseemly. And yet every year, our most esteemed, and especially elderly, writers crank out novel with important theme after novel with important theme in the desperate pursuit of the Pulitzer or National Book Award or Nobel. And then a bunch of guys in a conference room halfway around the world go ahead and give the thing to Doris Lessing. (Like the Nobel committee, I too once pretended to understand what Canopus in Argos was all about.) Anyway, it’s enough to make Philip Roth cry and we are not in favor of anything that makes Philip Roth cry, which is why we are also against the unexamined values of the middle class and the songs of Harry Chapin.
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