Ladbrokes, the popular bookmaker, has correctly predicted the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature with “a 50 percent accuracy rate” over the past eight years. This remarkable record is noteworthy because the oddsmakers do not actually read any of the books, and they do not go about “forming an opinion about the relative merits of each author.” Instead, the folks responsible for each year’s odds “appl[y] a numerical value to things like industry chatter, an author’s nationality, historical precedent.” So, that in mind, how confident do you feel about Haruki Murakami’s chances?
How the Nobel Odds Are Made
The Poet’s Voice
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with my husband’s American cousins, who have a five-year-old daughter. She is fascinated and confused by my ‘Briddish’ accent, which she seems to think at points is something I’m putting on. She invented a game where she’ll point at an object in the room and I have to say the word for it—Carpet! Dump truck!—in my best American accent (which is dreadful, by the way). This had her in stitches. When the laughter had died down, she turned to her parents, suddenly contemplative, and said, ‘Isn’t it amazing that Sarah knows a few words in our language?’” Lily Blacksell interviews T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Sarah Howe on how being in the U.S. changes her perception of language, writing in the first-person, and “authenticity.”
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Campbell’s Bliss
Read new flash fiction from Bonnie Jo Campbell in Pank Magazine. Peek behind the page in our interview with the author.
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Joyless
Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon — not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)
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Philip Roth Disses Fiction
Philip Roth, one of America’s most distiguished and prolific novelists, tells the Financial Times that he no longer reads fiction. Why not? “I don’t know,” he says. “I wised up.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sebald; Ugresic; Storace; Nunn; Mailer
Out this week: A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald; Europe in Sepia by Dubravka Ugresic; The Book of Heaven by Patricia Storace; Chance by Kem Nunn; and new paperback editions of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings and Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
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Near Deaths in Literature
Last week, JK Rowling announced that, midway through writing the Harry Potter series, she nearly killed off Ron Weasley “out of spite.” Ron isn’t the first supporting character to narrowly avoid death in an author’s rough draft. The Awl illustrates some of literature’s other close calls with death.
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