There is the Oscar, a bald naked man holding a sword. And the Emmy, a winged woman holding an atom. And then there’s the Edgar, a ceramic bust of Edgar Allen Poe and probably the ugliest award on the planet.

I mention this because the statuette’s unattractiveness (not Poe himself) was a major theme at last night’s 61st Annual  Edgar Awards, held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.  It started at Table 44 where I was honored to be sitting with such noted mystery authors as Julia Spencer-Fleming (All Mortal Flesh), Marshall Karp (The Rabbit Factory), and Jonathon King (Eye of Vengence and the forthcoming Acts of Nature, to be reviewed in our May 15 issue). Noting that each seat at the table had an Edgar Allan Poe Noddler or bobblehead, King and I discussed how these were so much more attractive than the real award.

And then King told me when he won his Edgar Award in 2003 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, his then-ten-year-old daughter offered to repaint the statuette to make it prettier.

It went downhill from there. One presenter advised winners to enjoy their ugly awards, and then when the winner of the Best First Novel by American Author was about to be announced, one of the statuettes broke in half. Was it due to the malevolent presence of Grand Master Stephen King, as one waggish presenter suggested, or did the Edgar, as another presenter noted, finally realize how ugly he was and broke in two? Whatever the cause, the winner Alex Berenson (The Faithful Spy) good-naturedly clutched both pieces of the Edgar in his hands as he thanked his editors and Random House for booking his hotel in Boston where he met his current girlfriend while on his book tour..

Moderated by Today show weatherman Al Roker, the ceremony moved quickly, ending at a surprisingly early 9:45 pm. The night’s biggest surprise was Jason Goodwin winning the Best Novel Award for The Janissary Tree. Goodwin could not be present to accept his award as his publisher had been too cheap to pay for his airplane ticket to fly over from England, an act publisher Sarah Crichton said she “deeply, deeply regrets” as she accepted the award. Crichton was refreshingly honest as she told the audience that she hadn’t expected Goodwin’s tale of a eunuch detective in 1830s Istanbul to win.

Other winners included Naomi Hirahara (Snakeskin Shamisen) for Best Paperback Original, James L. Swanson (Manhunt; The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer) for Best Fact Crime, and E.J. Wagner (The Science of Sherlock HOlmes) for Best Critical/Biographical. Interestingly, the winners for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay were the writers for Season 4 of HBO’s series The Wire, and these included some of the finest crime fiction authors working today: Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and Richard Price.

The highlight of the evening was the recognition of Stephen King as a Mystery Grand Master. After an amusing introduction by Dave Barry and  Ridley Pearson, as well as an inadvertently almost forgotten Donald Westlake,  KIng told the audience that he never called himself a horror writer and that the first three adult books he checked out from the local bookmobile that came through his Maine hometown were crime novels by Richard Stark, Ed McBain, and John D. McDonald. “These books changed my life,” King said, explaining that  they opened up his mind to what he could write about. “The reason why mystery and suspense are the most important genres today,” he said,” is because they mimic life. How we enter and leave life is a mystery.”  King ended his brief defense of genre fiction, stating firmly, “anyone who says this isn’t mainstream fiction is full of bullshit.”

At a panel discussion on Tuesday evening, E.L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, and Cynthia Ozick graciously discussed New York in literature at NYU’s Fales Library in celebration of its 50th anniversary and Pete Hamill’s donation of his papers (Doctorow donated his to the library in 2001, and Ozick is a class of 1949 alumna.)

Cynthia Ozick was rather endearing and had plenty of nice library quotes. She read from her 1997 novel, The Puttermesser Papers. In describing an idyllic New York City, she writes, “The libraries are lit all night,” there is an increase in gardening and a decrease in crime, and “the bureau of venereal disease control has closed down.” She spoke of living in Pehlam Bay in the 1930s when it was a semirural community: “We didn’t have a library!” Instead, they had a green truck, and she recalled shouting, “The library is coming! The library is coming!”

Pete Hamill had a few jewels of his own. His newest novel, North River, out in June from Little, Brown, is set in 1930s New York. To explain his choice of time and place, he referred to his last novel, Forever, which he finished writing on September 10, 2001. He, owning up to its length, took another year to add in the events of 9/11 and cut something out—the Depression, an era he saved to tackle in his latest.

E.L. Doctorow early on declined to identify himself as a New York novelist: “New York does not confer literary identity.” For him, “If the time was hot in a certain place, that’s where the book was set.” To close with an interesting fact, he was named Edgar after Edgar Allen Poe, who he called “the greatest bad writer.” He asked his mother why he was named after an “alcoholic…delusional paranoid…with necrophiliac tendencies.” She was not amused.

Britain’s top best-selling female author is surprisingly a New Hampshire-based writer. In a Observer magazine profile, “The Great Unknown”, writer Louise France examines the reasons for the astonishing success of Jodi Picoult’s commercial novels like My Sister’s Keeper and The Pact, and ponders why the literary establishment ignores her.

France acknowledges that Picoult’s narratives may not be literary or elegant and that her prose sometimes can be clumsy and sentimental, yet her books are impossible to put down. Her formula for success, France determines, Is: “choose a subject which is soon to become controversial and tell the story through a rotating cast of characters. Stem cell research, date rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teenage suicide - here are some of the knottiest moral issues of our times sandwiched between the soft-focus covers of what is commonly dismissed as an airport novel.”  

And Picoult’s latest, Nineteen Minutes, is bound to be even more controversial in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy in which 33 people were shot to death by a lone gunman.

In the profile, Picoult describes in now chilling detail how she drew on the Columbine tragedy of 1999 to research  her story of a high school shooting. Noting that one high school principal thought the book should be banned, Picoult begs to differ, “‘This is a topic we need to start talking about. We can go on not talking about it, but a lot of kids are going to die. People want to believe that school shootings happen in big cities like New York, but they also happen in small towns like this, where there is a high socio-economic bracket.’

Like many bookies since Kurt Vonnegut’s death last week (see Heather’s blog of April 12th, below), a library fundraiser friend of mine reminisced about the author — and of his own encounter with the man:

“As a child of the Sixties, I regarded Vonnegut with awe for his truth-telling, hallucinogenic imagination, which was combined with a clear perspective – unusual qualities in members of our parents’ generation! As a college sophmore in 1972, I even wrote him a letter. It went unanswered — for a few decades, anyway.

“One May evening, five or so years ago, Vonnegut came to a benefit that I was running here in NYC. My assistant, 25 years my junior but as excited as she knew I’d be, told me that Vonnegut was “outside, smoking.” I went outside. I went over to him, declaring myself a fan and requesting an audience. I was even taller than he was — maybe that’s what did it. Anyway, he consented. I bummed a cigarette, saying I thought smokers were God’s true optimists.

“After only briefly talking about the event we had ducked out of, we spoke of his work and inspiration, and then I turned the conversation to sanity and drugs. We talked about his son Mark’s book Eden Express, which I had found deeply moving. Vonnegut said he thought it was the best description he had ever read of sliding into madness. We talked about LSD, how it could catalyze some into mental illness. I asked him if he had ever tripped and he said that when he was at Iowa in 1965, his friends had tried to get him to, but he never did, fearing it would leave him insane. With his offbeat creative abilities, perhaps one could presume a brain biochemistry that didn’t need hallucinogens.

“Cigarettes extinquished, we went inside. My letter had been answered.”

Yes indeed.

Cormac McCarthy is having a very good year. As if an Oprah endorsement weren’t enough (see From the Book Review Vault: McCarthy’s The Road), now he’s got Joseph Pulitzer on his side. With this much brouhaha over his postapocalyptic novel, you know patrons are going to be asking for readalikes in the not-too-distant future. Nobody writes quite like McCarthy, but other scribes have successfully played with the idea of an American wasteland.

Just today, I came across our Xpress review of a 2004 graphic novel reissue from Drawn & Quarterly: Anders Nilsen’s Dogs & Water, according to our reviewer J. Osicki, is “a compelling, one-of-a-kind trip akin to Samuel Beckett conceiving Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a graphic novel”; it’s made up “of a series of spartan black-and-white illustrations of a young man on a road to nowhere in a vast, denuded landscape.” A stuffed teddy bear and various and sundry packs of animals are the boy’s only pals—the few people he encounters, meanwhile, are “desperate and hostile.”

The Road, of course, centers on a father and son who scavenge for food in “a devastated country,” to quote our reviewer Stephen Morrow. Here, “friends are extinct.” The protagonist in Dogs & Water can no doubt relate. Order his odyssey, and watch the circ numbers escalate.

To paraphrase my curmudgeonly coworker, it’s a wonder ole Vonnegut didn’t die sooner—the guy packed more tobacco than a tobacco tree. But I’m not here to cuss the poor sod out for his smoking habits—I’m here to celebrate him, LJ style, with a quick recap of relevant reviews from our database.

While I couldn’t come up with our take on his seminal Slaughterhouse-Five (except the audiobook version, read by actor, er, writer Ethan Hawke), we do boast coverage of his late career material, some of which may deserve another look:

• At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Kevin Alexander Boone
• Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction by Vonnegut
• Bluebeard by Vonnegut
• Fates Worse Than Death by Vonnegut
• Galapagos by Vonnegut

This morning a fellow editor left  a copy of Stephen King’s April 6 Entertainment Weekly column in my chair. HIs latest The Pop of King editorial, “How to Bury a Book” raved about Mischa Berlinksi’s debut novel, Fieldwork and chastised publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux for failing to  better market the book. “Under the drab title and the drab cover, there’s a story that cooks like a mother,” he writes.

 A few months ago in an another EW column, “The Secret Gardiner”, King sang the praises of Meg Gardiner, an American thriller writer living and published in Britain.  Lo and behold, shortly after the column appeared, Dutton acquired the U.S. rights to publish her five novels plus two new ones.

Not surprisingly there will probably be increased demand for Fieldwork. A quick check of the New York Public Library’s Leo catalog shows 18 holds for the system’s 11 copies. I would be curious to hear from other libraries about patron response to King’s editorial. Still, I feel a little resentment at how the opinion of one person can sway millions of reading decisions, especially since a few months ago a librarian blogger complained that books that received positive LJ reviews didn’t circulate in his library (Best Books=Best Circulating?).

Today in a web-exclusive interview, librarian and LJ reviewer Andrea Tarr chats with author Tawni O’Dell whose new novel Sister Mine is an April BookSense pick. 

Find out how O’Dell’s upbringing in Pennsylvania’s coal-mining country has shaped her fiction.

It’s been holding the No. 1 slot on the New York Times best seller list in hardcover advice/how-to/miscellaneous. The Divine Miss O. dedicated two episodes to it in February, sparking the biggest book reorder in history (two million!). And, oh, yeah: the old Polish lady who walks a half-dead shitzu on my street in Brooklyn was reading a copy in the park.

Inquiring minds want to know: Why wasn’t Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (BeyondWords/Atria) reviewed by your favorite library publication?Just who do I think I am not to assign this megaseller? It’s like this, book fiends: Publishers don’t submit every book to LJ; submissions get lost, stolen, or possibly eaten by feral dogs; and we certainly can’t assign everything that does land in the Bookroom. While our Xpress (that is, online-only) reviews allow for more coverage, there still aren’t enough reviewers at the ready—and not all books merit reviews. Some are simply more appropriate for LJ’s audience than others.

To be honest, I don’t remember The Secret. If it was submitted, it would’ve arrived around last September, three months before its November pub date, which means it was part of the fall deluge. I could’ve sent it to our trusty self-help columnist, Deborah Bigelow, who upon reading the press material wasn’t all that impressed by what the book purported to do. What self-respecting empowerment text doesn’t aim to “transform” or “teach”? Byrne’s credentials as a seeker/compiler of deep thoughts don’t make her unique, either.

My point is, it’s impossible to predict a best seller in the MySpaced-out age. Books with million-dollar publicity campaigns flop like dead fish. All that is certain is that Oprah has the Midas touch, and we Book Review editors don’t get fair warning. Ta.

Ernest Hemingway, who sometimes fancied himself a macho pugilist, has nothing on Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa in the boxing department. Check out the shiner he gave Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquez in 1976.

For full sordid details on the literary fisticuffs between the former best friends, check out today’s New York Times.