News Around the Net

The National Book Awards were announced yesterday. Winning the award for fiction was Colum McCann for Let the World Spin. Among other winners were Ken Waldrop (for poetry), T.J. Stiles (for nonfiction), and Dave Eggers, winning the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. And that's seriously an award. They aren't just making it up to give Dave Eggers another award, at least I don't think they are. And here's a play-by-play of the awards ceremony.

Philip Roth may have come up short on the Nobel Prize, but he's nominated for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. So he has that going for him, which is nice.

Men only read biographies of athletes? Yeah, well women only read books by Jane Austen! So take that! I guess if we're going to be insulted by anyone as a gender, it might as well be Oprah.

The Guardian is taking a trip down Memory Lane. What were your favorite books of 2000? 2001?

Why are so many people writing books these days, Nathan Bransford asks. If more people are writing, that means more people are writing about sex or fishing (I see a lot about these two topics while reading HFR submissions). Or sex and fishing. Or sex while fishing. Oh dear God no...

In a poll, voters chose Flannery O'Connor as the best work to be awarded the National Book Award in its 60 year history.