More Turkish idiocy

• Members of a Turkish brain trust are considering prosecuting the publisher of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

I feel sorry for the country that has to put up with asshole stupidity like this...

The publisher, Erol Karaaslan, said today that he expected to be questioned on Thursday by an Istanbul prosecutor as part of an official investigation, and faces prosecution both as its publisher and translator. The book has sold some 6,000 copies in Turkey since it was published by his Kuzey publishing house in June. The inquiry apparently began after one reader complained that passages in the book were an assault on "sacred values".

The investigation comes in the wake of controversy over the issue of freedom of speech in Turkey after Orhan Pamuk's prosecution in 2005. The Nobel prize-winner was tried under Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code for "insulting Turkishness" following comments he made to a Swiss magazine to the effect that a million Armenians had died in Turkey during the first world war - "and nobody but me dares to talk about it". The charges were eventually dropped. The author Elif Shafak, too, was last year acquitted of similar charges brought over remarks made by a character in her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul.

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).

Lawsuits, interviews and another publication's demise

• A Turkish judge has dropped charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk caused a ruckus a while back by classifying the wholesale slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, as well as of Kurds in the 1980s, as genocide, an opinion that the Turkish public was apparently not ready to accept. The charge against Pamuk was that he “insulted Turkish identity.” It’s a good thing the judge found a handy legal loophole to use as an escape chute; it saved the government from having to address the fact that they’re trying to suppress alternative viewpoints.

• Donald Trump is suing New York Times business reporter Timothy O’Brien.

O’Brien, as well as Time Warner Book Group and Warner Books, have the lawyer-hounds at their heels because O’Brien’s new book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald, quotes anonymous sources that allege Trump isn’t nearly as wealthy as he says he is. I got five bucks saying they’ll call each other names and point fingers and eventually settle out of court for some absurd undisclosed amount.

• Video: Bill Maher interviews Stephen King at Amazon.com.

For a strange new experience, watch Bill Maher interview Stephen King via Amazon’s new online video program, Amazon Fishbowl (a.k.a., “All We Really Want Is To Be The Home Shopping Network”). The interview starts out with the usual softball questions, but quickly gets interesting once Maher brings up James Frey and lets King, a former user/abuser himself, express his total lack of surprise that a drug addict might make a few things up. It’s too bad they both look like corporate shills in the process.

• Charles McGrath details the closing of The New Leader in the New York Times.

Another one bites the dust:

Over the years The New Leader attracted a band of loyal contributors who amounted to a not-so-short list of everyone who was anyone in liberal intellectual circles: George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Willy Brandt, Albert Murray, Hubert H. Humphrey, Theodore Draper, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George F. Kennan, Murray Kempton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Ellison, Hans J. Morgenthau, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to name just a few. All of them wrote for nothing, or in recent years for what Mr. Kolatch calls a "tangible token" of $100 or so. The sociologist Daniel Bell, whose connection to the magazine is perhaps the longest of anyone's, dating back to when he was a student at City College in the late 30's, said recently, "When you think about it, it's remarkable that The New Leader was able to sustain itself for so long."