It’s NBA night in New York — and thank goodness this has nothing to do with the Knicks. Tonight the National Book Foundation award winners are announced in four categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature — drawn from a pool of 1,258 books submitted by 200-plus contributing publishers. In recent years university-press titles have fared about as well at the NBAs as Ivy League basketball teams in the NCAA tournament — which is to say, not very.

One university press does turn up with a finalist this year — LSU Press has been named one of the five finalists in poetry, for Reginald Gibbons’s Creatures of a Day. It is the second year in a row that LSU Press has been represented with a finalist in the category. And if university presses are underrepresented tonight, the same can’t be said for high-profile university administrators. Drew Gilpin Faust, whom you may...

This has nothing to do with university presses, but I can’t resist a final post on the election — promise!

Every election acts as an incubator for annoyingly repeated catchphrases. Here are the ones I most look forward to never having to hear again:

“Throw someone under the bus.” — This was a conservative favorite. It was a little funny and a tad evocative the first time it was uttered, but the autopilot usage emptied it not only of its punch but of the direness of its implications. If I ever hear some anchor use it again, I vote for throwing him or her under the bus.

“someone, i.e., Joe the something or another“ — Call me Eric the Aggrieved, but this rhetorical device was as noisome as they came. “Vlad the Impaler” is great; “Tito the Builder,” insipid.

“a game-changer” — this is bad enough as a sports metaphor, but it was entirely empty whenever it was applied to campaign...

The very sad news has circulated of the passing of John Leonard earlier today. The word of his death sent me back immediately to an essay he contributed to The Nation about the strange corporate thickets the contemporary cultural critic had to inhabit. I still remember the sense of frightened awe the article left on me. He began by ticking off his publication CV:

“I was a Wunderkind. Now I’m an Old Fart. In between I’ve done time at National Review, Pacifica Radio and The Nation; the New York Times and Condé Nast; New York magazine during and after Rupert Murdoch; National Public Radio and the Columbia Broadcasting System. I was a columnist for Esquire, whenever Dwight Macdonald failed to turn in his ’Politics’ essay; at the old weekly Life before it died for People’s sins; at Newsweek before the Times made me stop contributing to a wholly owned subsidiary of its principal competitor; ...

(Warhol dollar print at warhol.org)

The timing of the paperback publication of sociologist Elizabeth Currid’s The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art & Music Drive New York City could not have been better. I received a new copy of the book last week from Princeton University Press just as I began to seriously wonder whether the three skeletal frames that had sprouted up behind my back window, threatening to permanently obscure the serendipitous view across the East River of an already dimming midtown Manhattan, would ever be completed and rented. Its moment of suspended construction seems like a conceit for the city as a whole as we sit and wait to see just how deep the fallout from the economic downturn will be. If the neighborhood where you live happens to be Williamsburg (as in my case), or the Lower East Side or Chelsea, the strength of the arts economy will inevitably be a part of...

I think this Halloween, I’ll go as Edward Said. Professors of Middle Eastern culture seem to have just become the newest national bogeymen in an election season marked by a conveniently renewed vendetta against “elites.”

Forget for the moment the malicious nonsense about Rashid Khalidi being doled out by the Republican candidates, a sour ragout of mendacity and meanness. Two paragraphs leap out in today’s New York Times article about Rashid Khalidi’s introduction to the politics of character assassination. If you are looking for a textbook definition of guilt by association in action, Daniel Pipes all but supplies it:

“If one’s talking about American political life, he’s at the extremes, at the margins. If one’s talking about the field of Middle East studies, he’s in the middle of it. But the field itself is dominated by professors who do not permit other points of view.”

Oh, I see...

Score one for the Empire. The British Library announced yesterday it had acquired a sizable chunk of former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes’s archive. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the poet’s death on October 28, and coinciding with the release of a pair of CD recordings of Hughes reading from his work, the acquisition of more than 220 boxes of Hughes’s manuscripts, files, and ephemera, at a cost of roughly $880,000, represents a coup for the UK literary community.

Beyond the question of the scholarly worth of the archived material — which is substantial, given that much of the material involves the publication history of Hughes’s Birthday Letters, the highly personal collection that appeared just after the poet’s death and that relates most intimately to his relationship with Sylvia Plath — the acquisition represents a victory for those in the UK have long argued that the...

Is it a sign of a particularly parochial and particularly American form of cultural isolationism that the initial response — even among the very well read — to the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature seemed to be, “Jean-Marie Gustave Le Who?”

John Sutherland, blogging in The Guardian, sees the selection of Le Clézio — who despite his lack of renown in the States has (a) taught here frequently and (b) fiercely fought in his work against the past and present of imperialism in the Americas — as a provocative thwack aimed straight at smug American sensibilities. Regardless of the intentions of the Swedish body, ignorance should set the curious off in a race to find a sample of the writings of the son of a Mauritian-born doctor and author of 30 novels and several collections of essays, and the route to experience Le Clézio runs straight through two university presses,...