Popular bookmakers Ladbrokes have announced their opening odds for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Smart money seems to favor Haruki Murakami, who would surely take the prize if it depended on recent book sales. Meanwhile the next two favorites are Joyce Carol Oates (6/1) and Hungarian author Péter Nádas (7/1). All signs point to this being another year of disappointment for Philip Roth’s fans – his odds of winning stand at 16/1.
Taking Bets on the Nobel Prize
Timekeepers
Need some more Jeanette Winterson in your life? The New Statesman is here with a short story. Titled “Gnomon,” it centers on a medieval blacksmith, Stephen, who’s asked to create his town’s first mechanical clock. Sample quote: “Time is irregular. One hour is not the same length as another.”
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Lauren Groff and the Artist’s Response to Climate Change
To combat feelings of hopelessness, Lauren Groff partnered with Greenpeace on a new campaign to get artists to respond creatively to climate change.
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Pamela or Plath?
I’m disappointed that I was only able to get 8/12 correct on the Guardian’s “Who’s the Poet: Pamela Anderson or Sylvia Plath” quiz, but I’m consoling myself with the fact that the 50% is the average.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Grossman, Baker, Dyer, Pierre, Wilson, Mukherjee, Grossman
In a big week for new releases, we have Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his blockbuster debut The Magicians; Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, reviewed here today; another new Geoff Dyer book, The Missing of the Somme; DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland; and Kevin Wilson’s debut novel The Family Fang (which one blurber calls The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Four of the five books above, incidentally, were featured in our big second-half preview. And out in a paperback this week are a pair of award winners: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land.
Goodreads Celebrates Its Tenth Birthday
“We started with just the two of us, and now it’s the largest reading community in the world.” Publishers Weekly interviewed Goodreads founders Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler about the site they founded 10 years ago, which now boasts 65 million members. Check out our own Edan Lepucki on Goodreads’ humble beginnings.
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None of these people will win. For years they’ve picked an obscure writer that no one actually likes to read.
That’s the thing about betting that everybody always forgets: the odds are less about who they expect to win than they are about who they expect people to bet on.
I think Transtromer emerged as a betting favorite shortly before he won the prize, but that’s pretty rare. Yeah, the betting line is more a reflection of the bettors than anything else.
If I were on the Nobel committee, I’d pick Vollmann to send the national security state a message in the wake of his Harper’s article. It’d be mischevous, but why not?
I’d like to see Aharon Appelfeld win.