It’s Nobel Prize season again (so far Americans are racking up the science prizes) and across the pond British gamblers with a literary bent are placing bets on their favorite author to win this year’s prize for literature. Although I like the image of tweedy professorial types surreptitiously hanging around their local Off Track Betting offices, Britain’s premier online gambling site Ladbrokes.com spares them the embarrassment. (Unfortunately I can’t link to this site as it is verboten by my company, which has also blocked access to MySpace.com!) But according to Susan Slater Reynold’s Los Angeles Times opinion piece, top candidates on the Ladbrokes site include Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk (3-1odds) and  Syrian poet Adonis (4-5) along with the other usual suspects: Joyce Carol Oates (yech!), Philip Roth (double yech!), John Updike (yawn), and poor old Bob Dylan (go,Bobby!) at the bottom of the pile at 500 to 1. Reynolds goes on to note the continuing controversy over the selection of the winners. Are finalists chosen because of their politics or their literary merits? Reynolds concludes that in the long run, “The Nobel Prize in literature, one of the most lucrative prizes a writer can win, goes, more often than not, to the least commercial work in the world. “  While I would love for Canada’s Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood  to be recognized, they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Munro is a short story writer, a definite strike against her, and not overtly political. And after the hoopla over controversial Austrian author  Elfriede Jelinek, those conservative Swedish judges aren’t going to honor another feminist. So I am placing my money on Bob Dylan. Think of the payout if he wins!—Wilda Williams