We're off to NYC for our big debut, so we leave you with this trove of worthies in case we can't post as regularly as we'd like while on the road (though we are brimming with good intentions). In the interim:
* Mario Vargas Llosa was briefly hospitalized for heart problems on Saturday.
Upon hearing the news during a cabinet meeting President Alan Garcia asked Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo to visit the writer, the president's office announced.
* The Caldecott and Newberry Awards for children's literature have been announced.
* James Wood's How Fiction Works - the closest many of us will come to sitting in on a master class on fiction - is taken up in the Sunday Herald, and we share their opinion:
His latest book, How Fiction Works - published next month - is a provocative, scholarly triumph which ought to be required reading for authors, readers, reviewers, students and teachers of the novel, as well as anyone who aspires to write fiction.
* David Ulin writes eloquently on the pitfalls and possibilities of revisiting the beloved books of one's youth.
* Bob Hoover rolls up his sleeves and has it out once and for all with Joyce Carol Oates.
Take me, for instance. I've read what I consider my share of JCO and no longer feel the need to continue. While her settings, characters, plots and language have long settled into a familiar groove, my disinterest in her work comes from not from her production figures, but her sloppiness, a condition that might be attributed to her immense output.
* The Times lists "Ten Things that make Cormac McCarthy Special," including "CORMAC McCARTHY IS NOT HIS REAL NAME" and "CORMAC McCARTHY IS HOLLYWOOD'S DARLING"
* Michael Gorra's review of the Coetzee for Truthdig is one of the best we've seen, proposing it should be read as a "late romance" ... (Thanks to Jonathon Hegg.)
Nevertheless, JC seems to address that question when, late in these pages, he looks to Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov as a way to describe his sense of a writer’s authority. He remains unpersuaded by Ivan’s attack on Christian ethics but shattered by his “accents of anguish. ... It is the voice of Ivan, as realized by Dostoevsky, not his reasoning, that sweeps me along.” And that statement can perhaps stand as an allegory of Coetzee’s own career. We can’t avoid politics, but the core of our life is elsewhere. The voice is what matters, not the ideas—the character, the soul.
* Benjamin Black is planning to knock off John Banville in the new year ... (via)
* Everywhere we went in France, people kept talking to us about Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The Times suggests it's worthy of the hype.
* "A new English translation of one of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s works reveals a story that is still as relevant today as it was when it was composed in the 1960s."
* Joanna Trollope takes the occasion of chairing the upcoming Costa Book Award to ruminate on the value of book prizes in general.
The thing about this prize - indeed about quite a number of modern prizes - is that the abiding principle is about reading as a pleasure. The five categories of the Costa act as a kind of giant book club, giving equal weight and prominence to all these different kinds of writing - and therefore of reading - and thus providing a salutary reminder to us all that in the solitary, and thus inevitably rather self-reverential, world of writing, and with the urgent commercial pressures of modern publishing, readers are the reason that the whole industry is there in the first place. And should be both thanked, and encouraged, in consequence.
* Edward Nawotka interviews Vikram Chandra.
* No doubt the idiot fans calling for the Mysteries of Pittsburgh boycott are the same knuckle-draggers who thought Daniel Craig couldn't be a decent James Bond. We urge all Michael Chabon fans to see the film twice, to counter such stupidity.
* Peter Carey is profiled in the Guardian on the occasion of his new novel, His Illegal Self, a review of which we've just finished.
"I'd never heard of Márquez and it's still the only book that I have knowingly stolen - that is, not returned to the person who loaned it to me. But since then someone else has stolen it from me, so I guess that's justice." He says the book helped him understand what he had been doing and gave him "as it did for Salman Rushdie and so many other writers, permission to tell a story and have proper characters. Of course I misread it. The book is actually much less made up, and grounded in the reality of his culture, than I had thought."
He's also profiled in the Sydney Morning Herald, and dines out with Time Out.
* How does one write about the Holocaust for children?
* Ben Ehrenreich has a long feature for the Poetry Foundation on Frank Stanford, and his search for the man behind the myth.
* How many of these worthy bookstores have you visited? (Via Publishers Lunch)
* Finally, for those of you reading right here in L.A., do come out and check out this panel we'll be moderating at Skylight Books on February 5.
Time: Tuesday, February 5, 2008 7:30 PM
Location: Skylight Books
Title of Event: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE Panel
The NBCC Best Recommended List
In December, the National Book Critics Circle launched "The Best Recommended" project, in which the NBCC asked its members to recommend books that they'd recently read and truly loved – new or old, trendy or obscure.
On February 5, the NBCC will announce its second round of recommendations and this panel will look both at the recommendations themselves, as well as the art of recommending: Who are your best recommenders (we all have them, right?), the worst recommenders (someone who consistently doesn't get your taste)? What constitutes a meaningful recommendation and what do you look for when you hear one? What about the business of recommending itself: who has the authority to do it, where do good ones come from and how does it sell books, if at all?
Please join the NBCC award winning poet Amy Gerstler, the NPR book critic Veronique de Turenne, the novelist Katherine Taylor, novelist and book critic Darcy Cosper and the blogger and novelist Mark Sarvas for this entertaining and lively discussion, and bring along some of your own recommendations!
Speaking of the Boxcar Class of 2008 series, when series host 
