David Ferry took the poetry award for his Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations. An octogenarian, Ferry quipped, "My only hope was a preposterous pre-posthumous award, and I guess that is what I have won here." Last year, he won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Award for Lifetime Achievement. Goblin Secrets author William Alexander took the award for Young People's Literature, and Elmore Leonard won the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters award, saying, "The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do in my life is tell stories, and this award tells me I am still good at it." [The New York Times]
You can't really read this post about how e-reading isn't reading. It's hard to know what to make of the argument Andrew Piper makes in his essay "Out of Touch: E-reading isn’t reading." He's saying that words read on screens aren't digested the same way as they would be if readers encountered them in a physical book. "If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration," he writes. "Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense." But Piper's argument is coming to us via Slate, which of course has no print arm (at least since it discontinued its print-your-own via Microsoft Word function long ago). So, since we're necessarily reading Piper on a screen, does that mean his argument always eludes our grasp in some fundamental sense? Maybe we should print it out and assemble it into a makeshift folded-and-stapled booklet if we want to truly understand what he's trying to tell us. [Slate]
Lawrence Wright to release a book on Scientology. Remember that New Yorker article from last year that detailed Paul Haggis' dramatic break with the Church of Scientology? The author, Lawrence Wright, will get the chance to expand on his reporting in a new book for Knopf, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. It will be published in January. In the new book, the author hopes to answer, "What is it that makes this religion alluring? What do its adherents get out of it? How can rational-seeming people subscribe to beliefs that others find incomprehensible? Why do popular personalities associate themselves with a faith that is likely to create public relations martyrdom?" Wright previously wrote about Al- Qaeda in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Looming Tower. [New York Daily News]
You can get mad about book banning, or you can sue. That's what one mother has done in Utah, where school officials took Patricia Palacco's In Our Mothers' House off library shelves after receiving complaints about the book's depiction of a stable family headed by two mothers. Tina Weber is suing the Davis School District in a federal class action on the basis that, "school officials may not remove books from school library shelves because they or their constituents disagree with the ideas those books contain." [Courthouse News Service]
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