paper trail

Oct 13, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

The floor of the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Twenty finalists have been announced for the 2011 National Book Awards in the fields of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and Young Adult lit. Nominees include Téa Obreht, Jesmyn Ward, and Edith Pearlman for fiction, and Stephen Greenblatt, Manning Marable, and Mary Gabriel for nonfiction. A full list of the finalists is available here.

A new British book award, creatively named The Literature Prize, has been created as a result of frustration with the Man Booker Prize.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh eulogizes his lawyer, and in the process, offers a mini-tutorial in investigative journalism.

The Frankfurt Book Fair begins today, and according to Publishers Weekly, along with novels by Laurie Frankel and Ben Fountain, everybody is talking about a debut trilogy by Swedish author Alexander Soderberg, titled the The Andalucian Friend. In other Swedish pop-literary news, DC Entertainment has announced plans to adapt Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy into a series of graphic novels.

Slate’s David Haglund revisits the controversy over John Updike’s homophobic review of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell. “Updike didn’t just express discomfort at the Hollinghurst’s precise, physically detailed observations about gay sex,” Haglund notes, “he actually wrote a kind of brief against gay love as a compelling novelistic subject.”

Asterix, the lovable, Roman-fighting Gaul of comic-book fame, is going on tour, and he's starting at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Matt Taibbi offers some advice to Occupy Wall Street protesters.