Howard Jacobson Surprise 2010 Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson on comic novels: “Comedy breaks every trance—that’s its function. Comedy is nothing if not critical. From the very beginning the comic novel set out to argue with everything and to set us arguing with one another.” A profile of Ethiopian author Dinaw Mengestu and his highly anticipated second novel, How to Read the Air, which will be published this week. Future sociologists will undoubtedly ask of our era: “What was the Hipster?” Luckily, n+1 is tackling the query on multiple fronts, with a new book and two panel discussion: one

Howard Jacobson has won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question. In 2007, Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote in Bookforum: “Jacobson is funnier, sentence for sentence, than early Roth and Joseph Heller put together. All comparisons aside, however, the simple point is that Jacobson deserves to be read, and read widely, on his own terms.”

Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie is writing a memoir about the years he spent in hiding beginning in 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini decreed that Rushdie should be killed for the “blasphemy” in his novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie says of the memoir, “So far I feel that I’m right—I’m not getting churned up and upset, I’m just writing it and I’m feeling quite pleased.” UbuWeb, the great online archive of avant-garde poetry, film, music, and performance has been hacked and is closed “until further notice.” Now that Hugo Lindgren has been named the editor of the New York Times

Tom McCarthy: odds-on favorite for the Man Booker prize. Imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize-winning author Liu Xiaobo has been unable to talk to journalists since the award was announced on Friday, and his wife, Liu Xia, is now under house arrest. During a short visit, Liu told his wife that he was dedicating the prize to victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Chinese authorities have called the Nobel a “blasphemy,” imposed a blackout on news of the prize, and broken up a banquet celebrating the victory. The Frankfurt Book Fair ended on Sunday, with novelist David Grossman taking

Liu Xiaobo The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to imprisoned Chinese author and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo. The PEN American Center has been campaigning for Xiaobo to win the prize (and for his release); last December, authors E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Albee, A.M. Homes, and Honor Moore gathered on the New York Public Library’s steps to rally on his behalf. More on 2010 Nobel Prize in literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa: the author’s first press conference after winning the Nobel; Granta editor John Freeman on why Vargas Llosa was a “phenomenal choice”

Mario Vargas Llosa Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the first South American writer to win the 1.5 million dollar prize since Gabriel Garcia Marquez won it in 1982. Perhaps the shared glory will end the longstanding feud between the two authors, which climaxed the day Vargas Llosa decked Garcia Marquez in a movie theater, leaving him with a black eye. OR books co-publisher John Oakes describes the imprint’s unique business model at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Tonight, NYU is hosting a memorial celebration for David Markson, the experimental novelist (and David

Grace Krilanovich At Publishing Perspectives, Chad W. Post reports on why Douglas Rushkoff, who will speak at the Frankfurt Book Fair, moved from Random House to the innovative start-up publisher OR Books: “With the traditional publishing system, there are too many middlemen, and too many people needing to justify their place in the food chain,” he says. “This ends up costing a lot of money, and ultimately costing a lot of time, too.” Tonight, New York City’s prose fetishists and fans of experimental fiction will likely be heading to a talk titled “On the Well-Tempered Sentence,” featuring Gary Lutz,

Lorrie Moore This morning, on the day before the Frankfurt Book Fair, former Soft Skull editor Richard Nash announced the Spring 2011 list for Red Lemonade, the first imprint of his “insurgent publishing start-up” Cursor. It’s an exciting list, which includes Someday This Will Be Funny, a new story collection by Bookforum contributor and American Genius: A Comedy author Lynne Tillman. Elissa Bassist publishes the excellent notes she took during Lorrie Moore’s witty conversation with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, in which she talked about humor, MFA programs, and her “ideal reader.” When the Nobel Prize for literature

Lydia Davis Tonight at the 92nd Street Y, Lydia Davis reads from her new translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Davis’s translations are as bracing and revelatory as her acclaimed short fiction, and her reflections on the process are always edifying (she’s been blogging about translating Bovary at the Paris Review’s Daily). Quick quiz: How would you translate the phrase, bouffées d’affadissement, from Bovary: 1. Gusts of revulsion 2. A kind of rancid staleness 3. Whiffs of sickliness? According to Davis, these are just some of the ways it has been rendered into English over the years. In a 2009

Stephen Elliott Martin Amis’s State of England: Lionel Asbo, Lotto Lout, David Bowie’s Object, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys. Agents reveal some of the big titles they’ll bring to this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. Actor and author James Franco has bought the rights to Stephen Elliott’s excellent The Adderall Diaries, which blends memoir, true-crime reportage, and meditations on the trickiness of storytelling. If all goes according to plan, Franco will write the script, direct, and star in the film. Elliott, who founded The Rumpus, seemed happy about the news, though he

Hugo Lindgren, the former editorial director of New York magazine and more recently the executive editor of Businessweek, has just been hired to be the new editor of the New York Times Magazine, a title long held by his onetime colleague, New York’s Adam Moss. Bill Keller has been looking to the NYTM’s biggest competitors to make the replacement: As the Observer recently reported, he first offered the job to the New Yorker’s Daniel Zalewski, who turned him down.

Ted Berrigan Tonight, we’ll be at Poets House, where Douglas A. Martin and Eileen Myles will read their work. Myles’s new book is Inferno, an autobiographical novel about becoming a poet in New York. Like most good autobiographical novels about writers, this one is gossipy (watch for stories about Ted Berrigan) (and even Richard Hell), sometimes cutting (a passage about Kathy Acker comes to mind), but never quite spiteful. Jonathan Lethem, best known for his novels about Brooklyn (though he’s also written about Manhattan) (and about black holes), will set his next book in Queens. Will the Bronx or

Yiyun Li The 2010 MacArthur Fellows have been announced, with three authors among the twenty-three winners. Journalist and television-guru David Simon, fiction writer Yiyun Li, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed now all have license to affix the word genius to their name. Barnes and Noble chairman Leonard Riggio and his group of board of director candidates have withstood a strong challenge from Los Angeles investor Ron Burkle, as shareholders have voted to re-elect Riggio and his supporters. As shareholder Howard Tannenbaum put it: “Riggio and his brother built up the company. What does Burkle know about book selling?”  In The Guardian, Jonathan Franzen talks about Oprah, being called a Great American

TALKING TO SARA MARCUS ABOUT RIOT GRRRL Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front, an engaging chronicle of the early-’90s punk feminist movement known as Riot Grrrl, is being published today by Harper Perennial. Writing in Bookforum’s music issue, musician and author Johanna Fateman called the book an “ambitious and convincing book that makes narrative sense out of events that had so far been recorded only in mythic, unverified, and fragmentary form.” We recently sat down with Marcus, who is a freelancer at our sister publication Artforum, to discuss her writing process, feminism’s fate in mainstream culture, gender bias in

Jason Schwartzman This week’s New Yorker is available in a new iPad version, with a nifty animated cover by David Hockney. In a note to readers, the New Yorker editors write nostalgically about the magazine’s early days, noting the scarcity of pencils, and marveling that founder Harold Ross “could not have imagined a day when the magazine would be available as quickly to a reader in Manchester or Madrid as to one in Manhattan.” They assure readers that “print remains, by miles, our most popular form,” before telling us how they really feel. “We’re at once delighted and a little bewildered about this latest digital

Don Delillo This weekend, we witnessed the maiden voyage of the Wall Street Journal’s new stand-alone Books section; Publisher’s Weekly chats with editor Robert Messenger. Farenheit 451, 2010: The Pentagon held a book burning on September 20th, destroying 9,500 hundred copies of Operation Dark Heart. The book’s author, Anthony Shaffer, told CNN: “The whole premise smacks of retaliation. . . . Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous.” And if you can’t burn ’em, ban them: September 25th marks the beginning of banned books week; did someone really think it was a good

Keith Gessen Via the Casual Optimist: Design consulting firm IDEO offers three visions for the future of the book, and, unsurprisingly, print isn’t on the agenda. IDEO’s video outlining their ideas is so blithe and whimsical that we we were swept up for a moment in their somewhat surreal concepts, such as “Alice,” an interactive e-book that aims to “[blur] the lines between reality and fiction.” As the narrator cheerfully intones, “stories unfold and develop through reader’s active participation . . . unexpectedly the reader stumbles upon plot twists and turns, embeded in the stories that are unlocked by performing

Jessica Duffin Wolfe, photo by Liz Clayton AN INTERVIEW WITH JESSICA DUFFIN WOLFE, AN EDITOR OF THE FORTHCOMING TORONTO REVIEW OF BOOKS Print book reviews have been having a tough time in the past decade, but there are grounds for optimism in the online world. And though the web makes it easy to cross borders, there is still a case to be made for grounding a publication in a specific locale. One example of both that has been getting a lot of attention is the new Los Angeles Review of Books, which is scheduled to launch in early 2011.

Leon Wieseltier FSG publicity and marketing vice-president Jeff Seroy is pals with the New Republic’s literary editor Leon Wieseltier—the two seem compelled to inform people that they went to Columbia together. But when Seroy dismissed TNR’s less-than-fawning review (by Ruth Franklin) of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom by saying that Wieseltier “specializes in drawing attention to his pages through consistently negative reviews,” the old collegial spirit quickly dissipated. Wieseltier has responded to the charge by penning a rousing defense of the value of negative reviews in a literary world “that is amiable, bland, clubby, pious, careerist, relentlessly cheerful, desperate for numbers, suavely relativizing, and awash in worthless praise.” Wieseltier writes,

Valerie Martin and Margaret Atwood, photo by Nancy Crampton. Canadian author Margaret Atwood read from her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, at Monday’s opening night of the 92Y Reading Series, an evening one-on-one discussion series entering its 72nd season. During the introduction, longtime friend and colleague Valerie Martin said Atwood was so prolific that she’s not sure who writes all of Atwood’s books. (“It might be a Sasquatch double,” deadpanned Martin, a wink at Atwood’s Canadian heritage). When Atwood is not writing, Martin said, the 70-year-old Ontario native is tweeting, blogging, or “on a carbon-neutral, around-the world tour”