This is from the Elegant Variation: an interview with John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle who has also published book reviews from time to time in the Times Union (and, yes, I am a member of the NBCC).

But to get to the point of your question, we should care about awards first and foremost because they help us decide what to read. There is an obscene number of books being published every year, every month, and awards are like these giant, all-reading, all seeing friends (we hope), which can whisper in your ear and say, hey, you gotta read this.

To stay valuable, though, they have to pick good books. They have to get it right, to put it crudely. I like to think the NBCC has got it right often enough to earn readers’ and booksellers trust. We awarded Toni Morrison long before the Nobel committee got to her, and Edward P. Jones before the Pulitzer tipped him. We awarded W.G. Sebald and John Cheever and Louise Erdrich when Love Medicine was passed over by other prizes and Frederick Seidel before he began to gather the cult following he has now. Richard Powers was a finalist four (!) times. We’re the only book prize organization to highlight the brave work of Robert Fisk or William T. Vollmann for Rising Up and Rising Down. None of our judges are paid. We do this because we love it and so the lists you see are the distillation of enormous passion and respect for the work that goes into writing a biography, a collection of poems, a novel, or, say, a 3000 page “essay” on violence.

For the complete interview, go here.

The Galley Cat at mediobistro has this fascinating post about book prizes in general and Doctor Zhivago in particular:

It really does seem like every other day there’s a new award announcement that goes out to the press, and almost as frequent is the backlash. V S Naipaul (paraphrased by Nilanjana Roy) once said that the Booker was “destroying literature” by looking for good, commercial books that died very quickly, while France’s Prix Goncourt rewarded “antiquated” books. Then there’s Gore Vidal, who pointed out that there are now more American book awards than writers. And Peter Whittle at the Times of London belives

Earlier this week, the Sunday Times reported that Boris Pasternak‘s Nobel Prize win for DOCTOR ZHIVAGO owed much to the CIA and British intelligence, who secretly facilitated the accolade to embarrass the Kremlin, which had banned the novel. “I have no doubt whatsoever that the CIA played a key role in ensuring Pasternak received the Nobel prize,” said Ivan Tolstoy, a respected Moscow researcher who wrote a book about the the matter, which includes excerpts from a letter by a former CIA agent describing the operation that followed.

In just three days, the National Book Critics Circle will announce the finalists of its 33rd annual book awards. The member votes are being tallied as we speak, and this Saturday the board will meet at the offices of Library Journal on Park Avenue South in New York City to deliberate.

The announcement of the finalists will be posted on the NBCC blog by 6:45 pm Sat. The blog is here.

The annual Story Prize, awarded to a collection of short fiction, is in its third year and has recently announced its three finalists: Rick Bass, Mary Gordon (who has appeared at NYSWI) and George Saunders (who teaches at Syracuse).

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USC Libraries Scripter Award finalists have been named. The Scripter is awarded annually by the University of Southern California Libraries to honor writers for the best achievement in adaptation among English-language films released during the previous year and based on a book, novella or short story. This post could go in my colleagues movies blog, as well, but since it is about literary adaptations, it fits for a books blog, especially since the movie adapted from Saratoga Spring’s own Steven Millhauser’s short story is on the list.
Here are the finalists:

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order by film title, are: screenwriters Alfonso Cuaron & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby for “Children of Men,” based on the book by P.D. James; screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and author Lauren Weisberger for “The Devil Wears Prada”; screenwriter Neil Berger for “The Illusionist,” based on the story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” by Steven Millhauser; screenwriters Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock for “The Last King of Scotland,” based on the book by Giles Foden; and screenwriter Patrick Marber and author Zoe Heller for “Notes on a Scandal.”

The selection committee voted to determine these five finalists from among the year’s 45 eligible films.

The full story is available here:
http://www.usc.edu/libraries/scripter/index.shtml

The winner will be announced Jan. 12.

So the Sobol award is gone, now here comes a new award contest. Here’s the skinny from Gather.com:

Today, I’m exceptionally excited to announce Gather’s newest writing competition, one of our most promising programs to date: The Gather.com First Chapters Writing Competition. First Chapters offers thousands of aspiring, but unpublished, authors the opportunity to win a guaranteed publishing contract with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, promotion and distribution by Borders, and a $5,000 cash prize from Gather.com. This competition will launch the career of one talented Gather member and introduce many others to the industry.

Maybe this contest will actually work.

In the world of literature, writers shouldn’t have to pay editors or agents to read their work, and that seems to be behind the failure of the $100,000 Sobol award, as reported by the AP:

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This is from the Hillel Italie at the AP about the novel contest that costs $85 to enter. Note the final quotation from Sobol’s executive vice president ofcontest management, Sue Pollock, : “The Internet has been more difficult to penetrate than we had hoped.”

A division of Simon & Schuster has agreed to publish the top three winners of the Sobol Award, offering advances of up to $100,000 for a controversial new literary contest for agentless writers that also includes a $100,000 first prize.

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