And the next laureate is...

Doris Lessing.

Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through her voracious reading. She had been born to British parents in what is now Iran, was raised in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and now lives in London. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, non-fiction and an autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

Ms. Lessing learned the news from a group of reporters camped on her doorstep as she returned home from visiting her son in the hospital. She declared herself totally surprised.

“I had forgotten about it, actually,” she said. “My name has been on the short list for such a long time.”

And the National Book Award goes to...

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Haven't read it yet, but I did just read his second novel, Prisoner's Dilemma, which was marvelous. I can only assume that his latest is worth it as well.

An obsession with prizes

• Jason Cowley dissects "the culture of prize-giving" in The Guardian Observer.

A lot of good stuff in this piece:

There was a time when, as Wordsworth wrote, 'Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.'

The culture is no longer so patient. In a time of information overload - of cultural excess and superabundance - our taste is being increasingly created for us by prize juries and award ceremonies. Art is beginning to resemble sport, with its roster of winners and losers and its spectacles of competition: the Oscars, the Baftas, the Brits. Indeed, the larger cultural festivals and prizes, such as the Venice Biennale, the Oscars and the Nobels, are consciously imitative of international sporting competitions like the Olympics.

The format for most major prizes conforms to the model of the Oscars. 'It's very much a case,' says English, 'of maintain perfect secrecy regarding the decision, assemble all the nominees, and roll the cameras in hope of catching bad behaviour, poor sportsmanship or just plain unhappiness.'

Obligatory awards roundup

• This year's Nobel Prize winner for literature: Orhan Pamuk.

The selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for ''insulting Turkishness'' raised concerns about free speech in Turkey, continues a trend among Nobel judges of picking writers in conflict with their own governments. British playwright Harold Pinter, a strong opponent of his country's involvement in the Iraq war, won last year. Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of Austria's conservative politicians and social class, was the 2004 winner.

• The finalists for the National Book Awards include Mark Z. Danielewski, Richard Powers, Ken Kalfus and Lawrence Wright.

A notable lack of the heavy hitters with new books out (McCarthy, Pynchon, Roth, et al). Still, maybe this will turn more people onto Powers' stuff.

• This year's Man Booker Prize goes to Kiran Desai.

She becomes the youngest ever woman to win the prize, doing one better than her mother, Anita Desai, who was nominated for the award three times, most recently in 1999, but failed to win.

Kiran Desai's book [The Inheritance of Loss] was hailed by the judges as "a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness".

Accepting her award, she praised her mother, to whom she said she owes "a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine."

Apparently there's now something called the Quills, which sounds like a rather desperate attempt on the behalf of the publishing industry to sex up its image by tossing celebrities and an NBC television broadcast into the mix. The top book prize went to Tyler Perry. The defense rests.

And somehow I missed this when it was announced, but:

• George Saunders is one of the recent recipients of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant.

Other recipients include writers David Carroll, Atul Gawande, Adrian LeBlanc, David Macaulay and Sarah Ruhl, as well as musician John Zorn (a personal favorite, yay for that).

Nobody's perfect

• At Salon, George Rafael points out that other Nobel Prize winners haven't been saints, either.

Now that Gunter Grass has outed himself as being a member of the SS, it's time for more dirt on previous Nobel winners from decades past:

Knut Hamsun, Mikhail Sholokhov and Pablo Neruda scraped the lowest depths. A lifelong Germanophile whose pathological antipathy to modern life and much of Western civilization informed his oeuvre, Hamsun (Norway 1920) became a collaborator during the Nazi occupation of Norway. His enthusiasm was such that he gave his Nobel Prize medal to that prime specimen of the master race (and failed novelist), Joseph Goebbels; he also met Hitler. Unlike his infamous friend, Nazi politician Vidkun Quisling, Hamsun escaped the firing squad after the Second World War; he was judged insane.

According to scholars, notably Roy Medvedev, huge chunks of Sholokhov's prize-winning "And Quiet Flows the Don" (USSR 1965) were lifted from the works of Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and anti-Bolshevik writer who died of typhus in 1920. His victory was the crowning glory of a Communist Party toady whose rise in Soviet literary officialdom, as witnessed by dissident writer Vassily Aksyonov, was nothing "other than a supreme farce. Decade after decade his pen failed to create anything worth reading. Meanwhile, his mouth created nothing but propagandistic banalities."

The most shameful (and least known) episode, however, concerns Neruda, a lifelong, unrepentant Stalinist. During his stint at the Chilean Embassy in Paris dealing with asylum applications from Spanish Civil War refugees, Neruda is said to have heavily favored those who shared his hard-line beliefs when it came to issuing visas. One wonders how many of the rejected perished in concentration camps or wound up as slave laborers under Nazi and Vichy rule. There's also the little matter of Neruda's aiding and abetting under diplomatic cover an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, an action he defended his entire life.

Much ado about Grass

• Gunter Grass's recent revelations about his service in the German Army are under fire.

So far, both Salman Rushdie and John Irving have spoken out in support of Grass, who has admitted that he was in the SS as a youth. This is a major shitstorm across the pond but over here it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. The way it's been explained to me, conscription in the military during Hitler's reign was compulsory. And Grass's entire body of work has been all about the struggle he had with Nazi ideals and his eventual rejection of them.

So if anyone can explain why they're so mad at him for admitting he'd done just a little more than he previously said he did, feel free. All of the brouhaha seems a bit hysterical to me. At least the Nobel Academy has stated flat-out that Grass's Nobel Prize will not be stripped from him.

There's an award for everything

• The latest "winner" of the Bulwer-Lytton literary parody prize has been announced.

Jim Guigli of California, come on down:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

One day, I will win this prize, too.

Just let it ring

• Neely Tucker digs up some gems on Bill Watterson at the Washington Post.

Half a warm appreciation of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the other half shedding a little more light on its reclusive creator. Best bit: Watterson refusing to take a call from Steven Spielberg.

• Karl Ritter recaps the recent brouhaha over the Nobel Prize on the Associated Press newswire.
  

So Knut Ahnlund doesn't particularly care for Elfriede Jelinek's work. Fine. But ask yourself, now: what's the point of the Nobel Prize in the first place? Like any award, it's just an invitation to a club. Clubs belong in junior high school and awards don't change a damn thing.

• Old news: "Sleeping on it" works. (from 2004)

I suppose it never hurts to be reminded of this. Once you hit the wall, you can either sit there and cry about it or just come back to it later. I suggest the latter.