Police have recovered a 400-year-old volume of Shakespeare stolen in England a decade ago and worth millions of dollars (pounds) after a man walked into a library in Washington, D.C., and asked to have it authenticated.

Police in Durham, northeast England, said Friday they had arrested a 51-year-old man over the theft of the First Folio edition of 1623, which scholars consider one of the most important printed books in the English language. It was among seven centuries-old books and manuscripts stolen in December 1998 from a display case at the Durham University library.

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he mystery began to unravel two weeks ago when a man brought the First Folio to Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library and asked to have it verified as genuine. The man claimed to be an international businessman who had bought the volume in Cuba. "We have people come to us from time to time with questions about books," said Garland Scott, head of external relations at the library, one of the world's leading centers of Shakespearean research. "It's not every day that someone walks in with a First Folio."

Scott said library staff members soon had their suspicions raised. The book was largely intact, but the end boards and some early pages -- which bore marks that would have identified them as the Durham copy -- had been removed.

Previously unseen documents, postcards, sketches and personal belongings of the Czech-Jewish writer, who wrote in German, have been gathering dust in the home of Esther Hoffe, the former secretary of Kafka's friend and executor Max Brod since his death in 1968. Hoffe's refusal to relinquish the documents led to a literary game of cat and mouse between her and the state of Israel, under pressure from the country's cultural elite, which on one occasion even led to her arrest on suspicion of smuggling Kafka's writings out of the country.

Now, following her death at the age of 101, Kafka lovers hope the row may have come to an end. Researchers are ready to pounce on the contents of Hoffe's flat, fully expecting the items will throw new light on the mysterious writer who died at the age of 41, as well as his friendship with Brod, his greatest champion.

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulphuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe's damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until two years ago when health inspectors intervened after neighbours complained about the stench.

"The opportunity to work with the American master Tom Wolfe is the kind of thrill and challenge that people entering book publishing dream of," Little, Brown Publisher Michael Pietsch said Wednesday. "Tom Wolfe is one of the great writers of his generation and he has been one of FSG's most significant and best-loved authors," Farrar publisher Jonathan Galassi said. "We are sorry to part company, and wish him all happiness and success in this next phase of his work."

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His new novel, "Back to Blood," will be a "Bonfire"-like tour of Miami, taking on "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition." Among the characters: a Cuban nurse married to a French sex doctor, a Haitian woman "who passes for Anglo" and "a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story." Publication is scheduled for 2009.

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According to a publishing official familiar with negotiations, Farrar, Straus and Wolfe could not agree on a new contract: Having lost money on "Charlotte Simmons," the publisher was offering a reduced advance for "Back to Blood."

The newly revealed letter, written by Wharton herself, seems to point to the suicide theory. It is dated Dec. 26, 1904, or just a month before The House of Mirth began appearing in monthly installments in Scribner's Magazine, and is addressed to Dr. Francis Kinnicutt, a well-known society doctor who specialized in the mental ailments of the well-to-do. At the time of the letter, in fact, he was treating Wharton’s manic-depressive husband, Teddy, who was beginning to behave in ways — eventually embezzling her money, setting up a mistress in Boston - that would lead to the dissolution of their marriage.

The letter begins by resorting to the timeless disguise of the advice-seeker. "A friend of mine has made up her mind to commit suicide," Wharton writes, "& has asked me to find out ... the most painless & least unpleasant method of effacing herself."

Only on the second page does Wharton reveal that her "friend" is in fact a fictional character appearing in the pages of Scribner's, explaining, "I have heroine to get rid of, and want some points on the best way of disposing of her." Later she asks: "What soporific, or nerve-calming drug, would a nervous and worried young lady in the smart set be likely to take to, & what would be its effects if deliberately taken with the intent to kill herself? I mean, how would she feel and look toward the end?"

"He's not in very good shape. It's breaking my heart," ex-wife Carol Mailer said yesterday. "He went in this time because his lung collapsed. . . . They got the scar tissue out, and the surgery was successful. "But I just don't think he's doing well. My heart is heavy," she said. Mailer, who was raised in Brooklyn and grew up to win two Pulitzer Prizes, was hospitalized over Labor Day in Boston for asthma.

But the 84-year-old dad "insisted on leaving the hospital to be at [daughter Maggie's] wedding" Sept. 8, even if he was too weak to walk her down the aisle, said Carol Mailer. An in-law at his home in Brooklyn yesterday said, "Everything's fine. He's recovering." Carol Mailer said: The kids are [at Mount Sinai] every day. "Norman still has a huge spirit and is making jokes," she said. "He was even thumb-wrestling. "He's an extraordinary man. He's a fighter."

"I've never gotten a financial award like that in my life," Eggers said Tuesday, calling from an airport in Los Angeles before catching a flight home to San Francisco. Eggers is one of six Americans to receive this year's awards, presented in five categories by the foundation. His category is Arts and Humanities. "Dave Eggers is not only an accomplished and versatile man of letters but the protagonist of a real-life story of generosity and inspiration," said Teresa Heinz in a written statement.

The author of the best-selling memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (2000), Eggers found out about a month ago that he'd won the award, which honors the late Sen. John Heinz (R-Penn.). Heinz's widow, Teresa, called to tell him he'd won, which he said was "surreal." Not for a moment, though, did he give even a passing thought to spending the money on himself. The 826 laboratories, which help inner-city youth with writing skills, are now nationwide. The seventh, in Boston, opens this fall and until now, only had $12,000 in start-up funds.

Winning the award is "validation for the work we're doing at 826," Eggers said simply. And, he added, "It's a relief." Eggers said he's been feeling guilty for the last few years because he was unable to personally give money to the 826 Valencia projects. "It's been eating away at me for a couple of years. It's embarrassing. I felt like a father who can't feed his kids."

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee is a woman of few words and generally avoids media interviews and public appearances.

But the author of To Kill a Mockingbird broke her silence briefly Monday at a ceremony inducting four new members, including former home-run king Hank Aaron, into the Alabama Academy of Honor. Lee, who lives in Monroeville, is a member of the academy, which honors living Alabamians, and was in the audience for Monday's ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, Academy of Honor chairman Tom Carruthers joked with Lee, saying he knew she had something she wanted to say to the crowd. "Well it's better to be silent than to be a fool," Lee said.

The audience burst into laughter and gave Lee a standing ovation.

The "Matrix" actor teamed up with A-Mark Entertainment, an independent finance and production company, to buy the film rights from Warner Bros. He will direct from his own adaptation of Paulo Coelho's philosophical book about a traveler journeying the world during the Inquisition in order to find man's purpose in the world.

Since its debut in 1988, the book has been translated into 56 languages and has sold more than 40 million copies in more than 150 countries. Warner Bros. acquired the property in 2003 as a Fishburne vehicle. The filmmakers' take is described as "Harry Potter meets Indiana Jones," with a sweeping adventure centering on a young Spaniard who embarks on a quest to find a hidden treasure within the Egyptian pyramids and ends up discovering a personal treasure that eclipses his wildest expectations.

A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript -- complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection -- using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm. A high-resolution, 3-D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.

The Venetus A is the oldest existing copy of Homer's Iliad and the primary source for all modern editions of the poem. It lives in Venice at the ancient Public Library of St. Mark. It is easily damaged. Few people have seen it. The last photographic copy was made in 1901. I was lucky enough to see the manuscript when I went to Venice with my husband, Christopher Blackwell, who is part of a team organized by the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies to photograph and digitize the ancient book.

The idea is "to use our 3-D data to create a 'virtual book' showing the Venetus in its natural form, in a way that few scholars would ever be able to access," says Matt Field, a University of Kentucky researcher who scanned the pages. "It's not often that you see this kind of collaboration between the humanities and the technical fields." Venice is not the most convenient work site. All the gear had to come by boat and be carried or dragged up the stairs of the library. Built in the 1500s, the library has been renovated periodically, but its builders never envisioned a need for big lights, a motorized cradle, 17 computers or wireless internet.

The question my colleagues kept asking is why was Picoult signing books at a Costco?

"Do you want the politically correct answer or the truth?" she said. "Well, the politically correct answer is because they sell a ton of books. And these all will go, which is very, very cool." And the truth? "I actually go to Costco, Sam's and BJ's because they sell a lot [of] books and because of that are allowed to have author signings."

"It's a tough world, fiction," Glass said, settling back on a couch in the atrium of The Heathman Hotel. "I feel like this has really been building by word of mouth." Glass' first novel, "Three Junes," won the National Book Award in 2002, a tremendous upset for an unknown writer. The book had been well-reviewed and was a bookseller favorite, but the award gave it a boost that pushed it onto paperback bestseller lists and raised Glass' profile.

"The difference this time is I have a slew of readers who loved the first one and eagerly awaited this one," Glass said. "I've had a good showing at readings, and a lot of people have really jumped in the deep end and read this book before they came to the reading."

Breaking into the world of literary fiction is notoriously difficult (not that breaking into mystery or science fiction is easy), and Glass is extremely grateful that her publisher, Pantheon, took a chance on her. She's also grateful to the editors at magazines who wrote her personal letters when they rejected her fiction. The encouragement kept her going and made her feel like there might be someone interested in what she was writing. In particular, editors at The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly nurtured her while the smaller literary quarterlies mostly sent form letters.

"The treatment I'm getting on this tour is amazing," Glass said. "A lot of people who've never heard of 'Three Junes' or me are responding to the book, and it's not like I'm Jane Smiley or Alice Munro."

The seller was Dr. Williams's Library in London, which said it needed money to survive and preserve its research collections. Five cameras stood on tripods at the back of Sotheby's book room for the sale of the volume, while at least two photographers took up posts nearer the front. For all the publicity, the auctioneer couldn't get the price higher. Sotheby's had valued the folio at as much as 3.5 million pounds, or about $6.1 million, above the record for such an edition.

"It's not a very nice copy," said Peter Grogan, a book dealer with R.A. Gekoski in London. "The title page is not in very good condition, and that's the face that the book shows to the world."

The collection of 36 plays, known as the First Folio, was published after Shakespeare's death in an edition of 750, and probably sold for 20 shillings, said Sotheby's. It includes 18 plays that might otherwise have been lost, experts said. The nearest comparable First Folio sold in New York in 2001 for a hammer price of $5.6 million, said Sotheby's.

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Only about 250 copies of the First Folio survive, and this one still has its mid-17th-century calf binding. There may be only one similar copy left in private hands, said Sotheby's, which holds sales of English literature twice a year.

About 40 descendants of Nathaniel Hawthorne gathered in Concord on Monday to watch as the remains of his wife and daughter, buried for more than a century in England, were interred in the family plot at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery alongside the author. "It's greatly significant to see the family reunited," said Alison Hawthorne Deming, 59, of Tucson, Arizona, Hawthorne's great-great-grandaughter.

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Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables," died in New Hampshire in 1864. His wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, moved to England with their three children and died there six years later. She and their daughter Una were buried at Kensal Green cemetery in London. Hawthorne's daughter, Rose, returned to the United States and started a Catholic order dedicated to caring for cancer patients. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, based in Hawthorne, New York, had paid to maintain the Hawthorne graves in England. But when cemetery officials told the nuns that the grave site needed costly repairs, the order arranged to have remains reburied in Concord instead.

On Monday, one modern casket containing the remains of mother and daughter was put on a horse-drawn 1860 wooden hearse and carried from a local funeral home through the town center to a church for the memorial service. About 40 family members and a group of nuns from the order followed the hearse in a procession. A minister offered a brief prayer and recounted the Hawthornes' time living at the Old Manse, located walking distance from the Old North Bridge, where the "shot heard 'round the world" was fired, sparking the American Revolution.

The procession -- which traced the path of Nathaniel Hawthorne's funeral procession -- then moved back through town to the cemetery, about a quarter-mile away. The burial, which was private, took place in the section of the cemetery known as Author's Ridge, not far from where writers Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott are buried.

75-year-old black American edged out giants of modern United States literature such as Philip Roth and John Updike, prompting outrage among the literati of the Right. She was chosen by 200 prominent writers and literary experts, including the British writers Julian Barnes, Sir Frank Kermode and Ian McEwan, who were polled by The New York Times. They were swiftly accused of pandering to the sensibilities of liberal America. "I'm flabbergasted," said Melik Kaylan, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and is the editor-at-large for Regan Books. "The decision shows a political process at work, both in terms of who writers feel they ought to vote for because of political correctness, but also who they wouldn't want voted above them. "There's so much feuding and jockeying between writers that some of them will vote in a particular way in order not to vote for each other. Toni Morrison is a charitable vote for them."

Beloved has stoked strong feelings ever since it was published in 1987. It won a Pulitzer the following year but its subsequent inclusion in school syllabuses was considered a radical gesture, with conservative professors protesting that Shakespeare was being replaced by Morrison. The book is a disturbing account of the brutality of slave owners and the misery of their victims before and after the American Civil War. But many have questioned its unusual style, comparing it unfavourably with late 20th century classics such as Philip Roth's American Pastoral and John Updike's Four Rabbit compendium.

"Toni Morrison is the perfect New York Times poster girl," said Roger Kimball, the co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion, America's leading review of the arts and intellectual life, and the publisher of Encounter Books. "Someone whose opinions and skin colour immunise her from criticism and whose cliché-riddled, melodramatic prose impart a hungry urgency to the tired Left-liberal yearnings of the paper's cultural commissars. Pathetic, but wholly typical." Other commentators came to Morrison's defence, claiming that few other books had made so profound an impact on the American psyche.

Michiko Kakutani recently embarked on her 25th year as a New York Times book critic, and it's gotten to the point that when her name is mentioned in print, you can see the smoke rising from the page. The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank." Most notoriously, last year Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.

Those who rip her are usually authors she has ripped, and their indignation often muddies their logic. Certainly Mailer's insinuations, in addition to being boorish, are unsupportable. It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time. (I slightly knew Kakutani when we were undergraduates at Yale about 30 years ago but have not spoken to her since.)

But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics' bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of "The Rite of Spring" and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

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The qualities most glaringly missing from Kakutani's work are humor and wit. Maybe in an attempt to compensate, she writes one or two parody reviews a year: of a book about swinging London in the voice of Austin Powers, of a Bridget Jones book in the voice of Ally McBeal, of Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision in the voice of Holden Caulfield, of Truman Capote's recently discovered novella in the voice of Holly Golightly. Talk about cringe-making. They are so awful, from start to finish, that you cannot avert your eyes, much as you would like to.

As the National Portrait Gallery planned to reveal that only one of half a dozen claimed portraits of William Shakespeare can now be considered genuine, Prof Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said she could prove that there were at least four surviving portraits of the playwright.

Startlingly, she said swellings close to Shakespeare's left eye, which she says are clear in several of the contested portraits, are evidence that he had lymph cancer. By dating the portraits, she said, it was likely that he had suffered for around 15 years in increasing pain and died from it. Little is certain in Shakespeare studies - nothing is known about his death in 1616 and much of his life is a mystery - but if Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel's claims win backing they will throw the National Portrait Gallery's three-year research project into the authenticity of Shakespeare portraits into serious doubt.

*****

Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who teaches English literature and culture at Marburg and Mainz University, took the unusual step of using forensic tests used by German detectives to study the morphology of paintings and sculptures that are claimed to be of Shakespeare. Measuring facial features - nose, eyes, lips, chin etc - and the relationships between them she claims that two paintings, a bust and a contested death mask of the playwright show identical characteristics. The features are so similar, she claims, that they must be the result of sittings with Shakespeare himself.

The four images with the morphological similarities are, she reveals in a book to be published in Britain in April, the Flower Shakespeare, named after the brewery family that gave the picture to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1895, the Chandos Shakespeare, presented to the nation by Lord Ellesmere in 1856, the terracotta Davenant Bust, which stands in the Garrick Club in London, and the Darmstadt Death Mask.

So-called because it resides in Darmstadt Castle in Germany, the mask is dismissed by many as a 19th century fake but Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel says that the features, and most notably the impression of a swelling above the left-eye make it certain that it was taken within days of Shakespeare's death. She said: "The cancerous growths grow bigger as the dates progress. "Everybody else has missed them but how else would an artist know they were there unless they had seen Shakespeare." Research for the book has taken 10 years and she says pathologists, doctors, ophthalmologists, dermatologists and imaging engineers have helped her build 3D images to demonstrate the similarities.

Ms. Patterson said the decision to sign Mr. Gilmore was not only a recognition of his proven ability as a storyteller and potential as a stylist, but also an indication of large publishing houses' surging interest in street lit. "We're just scratching the surface now," she said. "The publishing world is still starting to see the potential beyond the street, which is going to keep getting stronger."

Ms. Patterson said she had first seen Mr. Gilmore's books for sale on sidewalk tables in Brooklyn, where she lives. Then last June, George Witte, editor in chief at St. Martin's met Mr. Gilmore at the Book Expo America conference in Manhattan, where Mr. Gilmore had taken a booth.

Mr. Gilmore's prison pedigree gives him a street credibility that is almost as vital as his written word, Ms. Patterson said. Readers of the genre want to feel that the author is drawing upon his own hard-knock experience as grist for his books. "He's really writing about what he's been through," she said. "It's similar to the way hip-hop appealed to a mainstream audience."

Mr. Gilmore's first book for St. Martin's, "Extramarital Affairs," is scheduled to come out this year, Ms. Patterson said. Mr. Gilmore called it "a story about a married couple addicted to sex" who get caught up in a murder. It was written after his release from prison. Mr. Gilmore's books are filled with graphic descriptions, crude language and ghetto slang. The plots are gripping and often unfold in a real-life cityscape, often in New York's rougher neighborhoods. A character in Harlem, for example, may frequent real-life spots like Perk's or Sylvia's or the Lenox Lounge, a bar described in Mr. Gilmore's first printed novel, "Push," as a place where "you could get your drink on, your swerve on, and always your mack on."

Don't look for her anytime soon on Oprah, but Jane Austen, dead since 1817, is about to get a jolt of 21st-century image-making. When it is finished, Austen, the clergyman's daughter whose novels include "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma," will reemerge among the royalty of romance. In May, Headline publishers will issue her six novels as "Classic Romances," with glossy pastel covers depicting dashing dandies and bonneted Regency beauties, Reuters reported yesterday from London. "Our aim would very much be every airport bookshop, every supermarket," said the Headline fiction editor Harriet Evans. Complaining that Austen's novels had always been marketed in a dry, academic way, she said: "It is such a shame, as she is the archetypal popular novelist. She is the godmother of modern women's fiction."

Patrick Stokes, chairman of the Jane Austen Society, with 2,000 members in Britain, said, "I am all for it." But Patricia Clarke of the organization's London branch disagreed. "It is a pity that everything has to be dumbed down," she said. Joel Rickett, deputy editor of the trade magazine The Bookseller, said, "Repackaging the classics is a tried and tested formula — oldies are still goodies."

In a letter to the Washington Post, Golden says, "No storyteller or journalist is ever exact enough or an expert." He goes on to say, "It's worth bearing in mind that 'Hamlet' makes poor Danish history and that 'Lawrence of Arabia' grossly oversimplifies the politics and cultures of the Middle East."

The Post had previously run an article quoting experts who criticized the accuracy of costumes and dancing in the film. The new box office movie is based on Golden's novel and traces a girl's rise from poverty in a Japanese fishing village to life in high society as a geisha.

The romancer is set in a grungy New York of aspiring actors, writers and singers. Chronicling the desperate, consuming rush that accompanies young love from its first hints to its ultimate disintegration, the story focuses on two young aspiring performers grappling with questions of self-identity and emotion that neither is equipped to handle.

Michelle Williams ("Brokeback Mountain") is set for a roll in the film, which is scheduled to begin shooting in late January.

Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha moved from No. 8 to No. 5 on the Fiction Chart after selling 43,000 units last week. The movie adaptation, which went into limited release on Dec. 9, stars Chinese actresses Ziyi Zhang and Michelle Yeoh and will open nationwide Dec. 23. On Tuesday, the film adaptation received two Golden Globe nominations (Ziyi Zhang for Best Performance By An Actress In A Motion Picture–Drama and John Williams for Best Original Score–Motion Picture). "Geisha was written by an American-Jewish guy," producer Doug Wick told The Hollywood Reporter. "He wrote a book that was popular around the world but not well known in Japan. The story itself leapt past any national barriers."

"Rob and I started meeting for about six weeks," she told me. "I went to New York and we met on a daily basis. Essentially, the goal was to make an outline and out of that outline the film would or would not be green lit. So it was a very full outline. It was about 70 pages. It was essentially a screenplay without dialogue. We went to Japan after that. We went to Kyoto for two weeks to try and get a better grasp of this culture that was so foreign to both of us.

In writing "Geisha," Swicord said her approach wasn't the same as it had been on earlier screenplays for films like "Little Women" or "Practical Magic." "I wrote this in a different way than I've ever worked before," she pointed out, "because I was brought in after the director. Almost always with the films I worked on I work alone for a long time, having meetings with the producer, going through a kind of development process, sometimes meeting with the studio, but essentially I'm the only creative person on (the project), usually for a very long time. And then the director comes and there's this kind of interesting transition where the director tries to understand what it is that I'm trying to put forward and I'm trying to understand this director's vision of the project. And, frankly, that is an area where, often you see not just in my life, but in many writers' lives, where trouble begins -- where there is not a melding of visions. Sometimes the studio can be very surprised that the project that they've so carefully developed for such a long time will turn out very differently because that transition didn't happen with the director.

"In this case, this director, Rob Marshall, had a very clear vision of the film. He had a clear vision when I met him even though he didn't talk about it. When he and I started work, it became really apparent to me that he completely grasped the novel. He knew every single page of it. I've actually worked with directors who are directing an adaptation that I wrote who had never read the original novel. He knew every word that Arthur Golden had written. Mostly what we did together was I would put forward some ideas. He would describe images to me. We would put those things together in kind of an outline form and then I would sort of make recommendations about structure and the shape of a scene or whether I thought something was needed or not. It was a real collaboration. He listened to me. I listened to him."

Zadok, who grew up in Johannesburg but now works in London as a waitress, entered a writing competition run by Channel 4 television last year. Although she did not win, she was offered a book contract by publisher Pan Macmillan. The judges called "Gem Squash Tokoloshe" a "powerful evocation of a child's-eye view of rural South Africa."

"Rachel Zadok sets the private drama of a collapsing household against the backdrop of a changing nation and creates a tangible atmosphere of menace," they said. The first novel shortlist also includes "The Harmony Silk Factory," set in Tash Aw's native Malaysia in the 1930s and 1940s, and "26a," part fairy tale, part nightmare about twins and the tragedy of separation, by former dancer Diana Evans.

The fourth book in the category, Peter Hobbs' "The Short Day Dying," dramatizes the struggle of an individual to find reason in mortality and the divine. Whitbread prizes are awarded in five categories: novel, first novel, biography, poetry and children's book award. The winner in each group competes for the overall title of Whitbread Book of the Year, which carries a prize of $42,000.

The Swedish Academy will announce this year's winner of the Nobel literature prize on Thursday, amid a scuffle among its scholars over last year's selection of Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek.

As the Academy gave the date on which it would announce the 2005 winner, Academician Knut Ahnlund gave notice he was quitting in disgust at the 2004 laureate, whose writing he called "whinging, unenjoyable, violent pornography". In a signed newspaper article he said giving the prize to Jelinek -- which surprised even Austria -- "caused irreparable harm to the value of the award for the foreseeable future".

Ahnlund did not explain why he had waited a year after the prize was awarded to Jelinek to announce he was quitting, but Academy President Horace Engdahl suggested the move was timed to spoil this year's prize announcement. "This very possibly has something to do with the fact that this week the Academy will announce this year's winner," Engdahl told TT news agency. There was no immediate response from Jelinek.

To take part, booksellers choose two titles from each of the five participating publishers and display them for the month of May. Participating publishers are Archipelago Books, Dalkey Archive Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Random House, and New Directions. For each title purchased, booksellers receive a free reading copy. In addition, participating bookstores also get posters and other promotional materials featuring original artwork donated by award-winning illustrator Peter Sis.

In some ways the litblog is still a reactive genre -- we get many of our stories by noticing what's in the news, and declaiming whether we're for it or against it -- but one of our more significant strengths lies in our ability to react to what is missing from the usual media coverage of literature and the publishing industry. As mainstream book coverage, particularly the coverage of new fiction, contracts, blogs can present a new forum to address books and authors that aren't getting noticed elsewhere. Or maybe they do get noticed, but not nearly enough. One hates to say "midlist," but that term has become shorthand for what Marjorie Braman of HarperCollins identified on another blog as "the kind [of book] that is necessary, but for which there might not be a huge demand." She adds, in the context of describing that sort of book as gourmet mustard in comparison to generic mayonnaise, "Those who do have a passion for it are very particular."