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
Seeing Sound
Have you ever wondered what a music note might look like? Now you have, so go and check out Resonantia by artists Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, a work which tests the limits of “cymatics—the patterns that sound waves induce in physical objects.” One of Louviere’s projects involved photographing the “shapes” of each of the 12 notes. Spoiler alert: G looks like a devil.
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An Oral History of Oral Histories
Last week, I called 2011 “the year of television’s oral history” because of the bevy of recently published oral history books. As it turns out, the explosion is part of a trend, as Michaelangelo Matos notes in this piece for The Daily.
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“You have always been a dark labyrinth”
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Magical Journalism
“But where Smiley condescended, others were enthralled. Salmon Rushdie waxed lyrical, John Updike found it ‘stunning,’ Susan Sontag hosted him at dinner parties. Gabriel Garcia Marquez dubbed him, simply, ‘the Master’ – high praise from the founder of magical realism, but Kapuściński seemed to one-up Garcia Marquez by injecting magic into real politics, and elucidating thereby the human tension and bewilderment connected to power that traditional journalism left hidden.” Ryszard Kapuściński: novelist? Journalist? Or something else entirely?
Reading and Rock and Roll
The latest episode of WNYC’s Soundcheck features Jennifer Egan discussing her rock-inflected novel A Visit from the Goon Squad and Bookslut’s Michael Schaub talking up other “essential rock fiction.” (Thanks, Derek)
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Even If You Lose, You Win
The deadline for BOMB‘s poetry contest — judged by Leaving the Atocha Station author Ben Lerner! — is April 16th. The $20 submission fee should be pretty palatable to everyone because it comes with a subscription to the magazine.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Buckley; May; Vallgren; Miller
Out this week: The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley; Paradise City by Elizabeth May; The Merman by Carl-Johan Vallgren; and The Penguin Collected Plays of Arthur Miller. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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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.