Why are three paragraphs devoted to Britney Spears in this San Diego Union-Tribune book review?
• I don’t ever want to be accused of shirking any reporting duties pertaining to my literary neighbors up north. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to this year’s Writers’ Trust Award winners. Kenneth Harvey won the $15,000 fiction prize for Inside. And Dragan Todorovic nabbed the non-fiction prize for The Book of Revenge: A Blues for Yugoslavia. Todorovic was forced out of Yugoslavia because he wrote negative essays about Slobodan Milosevic. Which isn’t a hard thing to do. Aside from being a specialist in genocide, the late dictator also had no penis. You might think I’m lying about that last factoid, but I happen to know that the Uncyclopedia would never steer me wrong. • The Guardian asks, “How old is a young novelist?” That’s a very good quesiton. Granta may be in the business of celebrating the best writers under 40 or under 35. But what of debut novelists like Sam Savage? Or late start biographers like Claire Tomalin? I hereby demand that Granta create the Old Fogey Award, wh
