California Literary Review

Bad sex award exposes this year’s nominees: But Campbell’s prose is considerably less purple than some of the other contenders for this year’s prize, including new age novelist Paulo Coelho for his novel Brida, in which the act of sex – on a public footpath – is described as “the moment when Eve was reabsorbed into Adam’s body and the two halves became Creation”. [Guardian]

Death is a hot topic among writers these days: “Life,” Truman Capote quipped, “is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.” Judging from what’s being published these days, writers have been tackling that disappointing last act a lot lately — analyzing, deconstructing, fiddling with the lighting — even when they know it’s futile to try to change the ending. [LA Times]

Nabokov’s last, unfinished, novel finally to be published by his son: It is one of literature’s most fiercely-guarded secrets, a great author’s unfinished masterpiece that has lain deep within the vaults of a Swiss bank for more than three decades. [Independent]

Book Prizes Awarded With Nod to History: Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction on Wednesday night for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” a sweeping, prodigiously researched biography of three generations of a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson. [NYT]

Is this the end of misery memoirs?: After years at the top of bestseller lists, misery memoirs are losing their appeal. Are they about to become just a bad memory? [Guardian]

History’s missing pages: Iranian academic sliced out sections of priceless collection: Leading scholars at the library are at a loss to explain why Farhad Hakimzadeh, a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that have been in the nation’s collection for centuries. The monetary damage he caused over seven years is in the region of £400,000 but Dr Kristian Jensen, head of the British and early printed collections at the library, said no price could be placed upon the books and maps that he had defaced and stolen. [Guardian]