TW: The Nobel Prize in Literature gurus have apparently decided Americans are not worthy of the Prize. They feel we are not worthy...as opposed to some of the stiffs they have given the Prize. Posh, I say...
From Int'l Herald Tribune:
"If you are John Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Joyce Carol Oates, you do not have to worry about whether the phone bill has been paid. You will not be getting the call from Stockholm [anytime soon]...
Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature..."Europe is still the center of the literary world," he said, not the United States, and he suggested that American writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture." He added: "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."
...any American foolhardy enough to bet on the prize..would be well advised to put his money on a writer whom nobody in the United States has ever heard of and who is out of print there or, ideally, has never been published at all...Another good betting strategy is to look for a writer with a record of America-bashing...
In other words, the Nobel selection process is hardly the lofty and purely literary exercise - the "big dialogue" - that Engdahl suggests, and it never has been. Whatever else the prize may be, it is not a guarantee of literary excellence. Critics are always pointing out that the list of writers who never won, which includes Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov and Auden, is far more impressive than the roster of those who did."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/05/america/nobel.php
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