literature

A genealogist exposed Surviving with Wolves, Misha Defonseca's celebrated memoir of the Holocaust, as a pack of lies.

In Zimbabwe, for a few months during the early stages of the collapse of civil society under Robert Mugabe, I flitted from bookshop to bookshop, happy as a hummingbird in a tropical greenhouse. Paperbacks cost as little as a penny apiece, and hardbacks rarely topped a single US dollar. The inventory consisted largely of remainders or possibly even of books reported by distributors as unsold and destroyed. And one book was everywhere: Fragments, the 1995 Holocaust fraud by Binjamin Wilkomirski. MORE

Novelist Zadie Smith offended literary aspirants by declaring that she and the other judges found no entries worthy of the 2008 Willesden Herald Short Story Prize.

Giosue Carducci, Henrik Pontoppidan, Giorgos Seferis, and Sully Prudhomme each won a Nobel gong for literature; Tolstoy, Borges, and Ibsen did not.

Zadie Smith's defense of high standards recalls V. S. Naipaul's tactic, when judging a weak field in a literary contest at Makerere University.  He awarded only one prize, and called it Third Prize.  Were the 850 Willesden entries really so bad?  Having been spared reading them, I cannot know.  What I do know is that prizes matter more than they should, and if their intent is to encourage good writing, incentivize greatness, and give bad writers kicks in the pants, then Smith's haughty dismissal has accomplished more than any actual prize would have.