California Literary Review

Le Clézio, French Writer, Wins Nobel: France’s Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for works characterized by ”poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy” and focused on the environment, especially the desert. [NYT]

Days of children reading books ‘are numbered’: The days of children reading traditional books are numbered, claims the man spearheading a campaign to improve literacy in schools. [Independent]

Can New Bookstores Survive?: In the long-term, whether experience, distinctive inventory, new ways of merchandising or deep pockets will be enough for the latest crop of bookstores to weather the all-important first five years of business is anyone’s guess. [Publishers Weekly]

E-Textbooks for All: an experiment soon to be underway at the University of Texas at Austin will shift certain classes entirely to e-textbooks. [Inside Higher Ed]

Top novelist feels pressure to ‘dumb down’: Margaret Drabble, one of Britain’s leading novelists and biographers, believes her publishers are pushing her to “dumb down” her work to appeal to a larger readership. [Independent]

Author’s mass-market success upsets Indian literati: He is the biggest-selling writer in English you’ve never heard of. His name doesn’t grace any Booker list, but it is found on the lips of every college student in India. While the global literati dwell on the fiction of India’s past, Chetan Bhagat has become India’s favourite writer by embracing the present. [Guardian]

Charles Wright, Novelist, Dies at 76: Charles Wright, who wrote three autobiographical novels about black street life in New York City between 1963 and 1973 that seemed to herald the rise of an important literary talent but who vanished into alcoholism and despair and never published another book, died on Oct. 1 in Manhattan. [NYT]

An insular view of the Nobel prize: The Nobel prize for literature doesn’t really have much to do with literary excellence – and that’s not a bad thing. [Guardian]