is easily one of the best blogs out there, and the prizes that they started are fantastic. Here are the winners of the awards for and

I don’t honestly think I have a chance of winning this, but I’d love to be nominated . . . And there’s no way in hell I’ll nominate myself. So if anyone feels so inclined, I’ll be indebted to you for life. Or at least until I buy you a few drinks.

Now back to your regularly scheduled modesty.

Over the course of the summer, the NBF has been highlighting all from the past 60 years of the award. (Some years featured paperback and hardcover winner, etc., which is why the numbers don’t match.) Every day since July 7th, a different title has been featured on the blog complete with a short write-up by various writers, publishers, reviewers, or NBF director (and translator) Harold Augenbraum. (They even let me write two of these: one for by Thomas Pynchon and one for by William Gaddis.) Well, now that the 77 part overview is complete, 140 writers from across the country have selected the six best books from the list, and it’s the Best National Book Award Fiction Winner from the past 60 years. Here are the finalists:

• The Stories of John Cheever

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

• Collected Stories of William Faulkner

• The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

Granted, all of these have their merits, but short story collections? C’mon, this should be a Pynchon slam dunk . . . So, click on the link above to vote for Thomas Pynchon and have a chance to win two tickets to the 2009 NBA ceremony on November 18th.

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The Millions is one of the most consistently interesting and well-written litblogs out there, and their new project is a perfect example of why this site is so popular and respected. In their own words, here’s the scope and purpose of the project:

It’s a bit early, of course, to pass definitive judgment on the literary legacy of the ’00s, or how it stacks up against that of the 1930s, or 1850s. Who knows what will be read 50 years from now? But, with the end of the decade just a few months away, it seemed to us at The Millions a good time to pause and take stock, to call your attention to books worthy of it, and perhaps to begin a conversation.

To that end, we’ve conducted a poll of our regular contributors and 48 of our favorite writers, editors, and critics (listed below), asking a single question: “What are the best books of fiction of the millennium, so far?” The results were robust, diverse, and surprising.

We’ve finished tabulating them, and this week, we’ll be counting down the Top 20 vote-getters, at a rate of five per day. Each book will be introduced by one of the panelists who voted for it. On Friday, we’ll reveal Number One, along with the results of a parallel reader poll conducted via our Facebook group. And next week, we’ll run follow-up posts including Honorable Mention and “Best of the Rest” lists.

The list is pretty Anglo so far (Marilynne Robinson, Ian McEwan, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Lynne Tillman, and Jeffrey Eugenides), but I’ve read some speculation that a certain dead Chilean will come in at #1 . . . Nevertheless, this is a pretty fun idea, and one that results in a great reading list.

J R is the perfect novel for our new recession-driven world. Similar to Gravity’s Rainbow (which I wrote about earlier), this is another encyclopedic novel with dozens of characters, subplot upon subplot, quite literally overflowing with ideas, conversations, and detritus. And money. It’s all about money.

At the heart of this comic masterpiece is an eleven-year-old boy named J R, who, with a bit of capitalist ingenuity and the help of his music teacher Edward Bast, builds a paper fortune out of surplus goods, common stock, and an unerring ability to game the system. It’s a coming-of-age tale for the late-capitalist period of irrational exuberance.

Of course, things fall apart in the end. Bast—who dreams of becoming a composer—loses his artistic mojo, and J R’s paper empire is just that, and implodes like a house of cards. (Sound familiar?)

for the complete piece.

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

This is arguably one of twentieth-century literature’s most recognizable opening lines. A “Call me Ishmael” for the paranoids, the pot smokers, the conspiracy theorists who see patterns in everything. “No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into . . .”

I first read Gravity’s Rainbow the summer after graduating from college and was instantly convinced that this was THE BOOK OF ALL BOOKS. Everything is here—high level musings on philosophy, physics, chemistry, psychology, séances and the beyond; outrageous names (lots of outrageous names: Pig Bodine, Teddy Bloat, Pirate Prentice, Captain Dominus Blicero), songs, and a surreal trip down a toilet; information about “Them,” V-2 rockets, and absolute fear. High culture and pop references. History and trivia. And out of all that comes a the obsessive feeling that all these pieces might add up to something of Monumental Importance, or might just be a fun way to kill a few months . . .

It’s almost impossible to even summarize this novel, which features more than 400 different characters and dozens of plot threads. I mean, this is a novel that starts with a top-secret military group studying data on how each of Tyrone Slothrop’s sexual encounters takes place at a location that is hit by a V-2 rocket days later. Is this just coincidence? Or is it a result of experiments done on Baby Tyrone by Laszlo Jamf involving a mysterious substance called Imipolex G? And what the hell is the significance of the “00000” rocket and the S-Gerät component?

for the entire piece. And you can find all 77 write-ups at the

As can be expected, the posts are very thoughtful, literary, and well-written, and the mission is quite admirable:

The blog’s purpose is to gather information and ideas in various fields that are having, or will have, an impact on literary reading: the sociology of (literary) reading, the neuroscience of (literary) reading, the marketing of literary work, delivery systems, educational approaches, and innovative projects that cultivate a passion for literature. I hope that, in the future, guest bloggers with expertise in a variety of fields will post to the blog, by their own suggestion or my invitation. In the end, we should achieve a cross-disciplinary digest.

With Open Letter gearing up to launch its first titles, and my general interest in how readers find out about books, I was particularly drawn to the post on literary marketing:

Question: how will literary books be marketed in the future? Marketing, for most literary publishers, is conservative and traditional, with small investment based on the expected small returns (or figments of large returns). Particularly for literary works, it’s often hard to see how the investment of, say, $25,000 or $50,000 could make a long-term difference in most literary books or authors, even though the book itself may have great literary merit. And where would such capital come from? A publisher once told me that his market research is “I publish the book and I figure out the market for that book when I see how many people buy it.” Not too many industries work this way, especially in the “long tail” era.

Yeah, market research. Hm. When I talk to other students at the Simon business school (where I’ve recently been taking classes “for fun”) about independent publishing, they’re usually a bit shocked by how quaint (re: out-of-touch) the industry seems . . .

Augenbraum’s final bit scares the crap out of me though:

If, as analysts suggest, the digital age brings with it a loss of personal autonomy, replaced perhaps by small-group autonomy, perhaps open source marketing campaigns could result. Yet if the literary novel in particular is the last bastion of the individual voice, can marketing based on a multiple perspective broaden its audience? And could the unthinkable happen: the editing (or even creation) of a literary novel based on early e-list feedback, the way one develops cars and edits movies? Forget print-on-demand. How about write-on-demand?

Anyway, this promises to be another great site discussing literature and books in a serious, useful, interesting way.

According to the site,

These five writers have each been selected by a previous National Book Award Finalist or Winner as someone whose work is particularly promising and exciting and is among the best of a new generation of writers.

It’s a great list, but I’m especially glad to see Dinaw Mengestu on here. He’s a great person, and definitely deserving of all the accolades he’s been receiving.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, as well as the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Mengestu has written for Rolling Stone and Harper’s, among other publications. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, his first novel, has been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Etranger in France, and was called “a great African novel, a great Washington novel, and a great American novel” by the New York Times. He lives in New York City.