That's Doctor Yunior to you

Junot Diaz will receive an honorary doctorate of letters this spring from the best college ever. Congratulations!

The other NBA

Your nominees for the 2012 National Book Award:

In fiction:
Junot Diaz, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER
Dave Eggers, A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING (reviewed here)
Louise Erdrich, THE ROUND HOUSE
Ben Fountain, BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK (reviewed here)
Kevin Powers, THE YELLOW BIRDS

In nonfiction:
Anne Applebaum, IRON CURTAIN
Katharine Boo, BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Robert Caro, THE PASSAGE OF POWER
Domingo Martinez, THE BOY KINGS OF TEXAS
Anthony Shadid, HOUSE OF STONE

Check out the poetry and YA finalists here.

Hoping for a big win for Katharine Boo, whose BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS is so fascinating and incredibly reported. I don't really have a rooting interest in fiction; I would like Eggers not to take it, for reasons we can discuss, but my review is a good starting point. BILLY LYNN I liked with reservations, and I haven't read the others yet.

Poor Yunior.

Salcedense (noun) Person or native of the region of Salcedo; since the construction in question is Spanish, the region is likely to be either the city of Salcedo in the Dominican Republic or a territory in Ecuador. (Pronounced: sahl-seh-DEN-say.) 

As used in the new Junot Diaz short story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love" (New Yorker, 7/23/12 issue). The subject described as a salcedense (the narrator's ex-girlfriend) is assumed to be Dominican in this case from context provided by this later passage:

In general, any Spanish word ending in -dense denotes origin or nationality, hence the little used but grammatically Estadounidense, resident of the Estados Unidos (United States).

(And while we're here, clavo saca clavo means roughly "one worry replaces another"; literally, one nail takes out another.)

Taken two weeks ago, Asbury Park, NJ

When You Say Wharton, You've Said It All

Or have you? THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH are just two of the books on Doree Shafrir's terrific list of favorite New York fiction. Our lists would overlap in a lot of places but I'm so happy to see THE BEST OF EVERYTHING on there as a choice I think is somewhat overlooked. And HARRIET THE SPY! A book I never really associated with New York City, but she did eat egg creams and own a dumbwaiter, so.

Hey, remember when everyone used to talk about Generation X?

Details made a list of the 25 best Generation X books, representing "authors who composed their masterpieces on computers instead of Underwoods, and were affected more directly by Nintendo than Nagasaki." Oscar Wao makes an appearance, as do THE CORRECTIONS, EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU, RANDOM FAMILY and A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this list is way more enticing than I had expected when AMERICAN PSYCHO came up as the first title. (I liked it, but Bateman as a standard bearer was not promising.) Picking that Rick Perlstein book about Goldwater is a stroke of genius -- or I think it will be when I get around to reading it. But the notion of Gen-X, so beloved of '90s magazine writers (they're ruining everything! Wait, they're actually the best!), never gets aired out any more. By some researchers' stats the President would be a Gen-Xer (if you consider that the last members of the Baby Boom generation were born in 1960), but no one ever referred to his campaign as "the Gen-X campaign." You wouldn't, it would sound silly. It was such a powerful social term, and then it vanished.

So why publish this list now that the term has fallen out of favor somewhat? Well, Generation X writers have had time now to establish themselves. I didn't check to see if every author on there would fall into that demographic*, but to take two mentioned up there, both Junot Diaz and DFW had substantial gaps between first success and next major acclaimed work (11 and 9 years, respectively). If Details had made this list in 1996, DFW would have made it but Diaz probably wouldn't have on the strength of his first book alone.

A list of Generation Y writers made today would consist largely of prodigies -- or whatever you would call people who had been published at age 28 or under -- and perhaps not be representative of trends shared by the entire group. (And while we're on my generation, we reject the label "Millennials," as if being born in the '80s were akin to joining a cult and we're going to go all comet-eyed any minute, so stop trying to make fetch happen.)

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*I checked the authors mentioned here -- Diaz b. 1968, Franzen b. 1959, Steven Johnson b. 1968, DFW b. 1962, Ellis b. 1964, Perlstein b. 1969. LeBlanc I couldn't confirm but she graduated from undergrad in '86 according to her website so we'll put her b. 1964. Franzen is probably over the line into late-Boomer, but that's a wavery line.

Post-Its: The Get Well Soon, Garrison Keillor Edition

The chronicler of Lake Wobegon (where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and all the children are above average) is expected to be released from the hospital today after suffering a minor stroke last week. It would be hard to imagine Saturday-night dinners at home without his voice in the background. Quick recovery wishes also go out to Raych of Books I Done Read.

EW.com: A week from Sunday is the premiere of "Bored to Death," Jonathan Ames' HBO series about a writer turned private detective. We don't have HBO and weren't impressed by Ames' I LOVE YOU MORE THAN YOU KNOW (subgenre: Look At My Crazy Sex Life, Isn't It Sooooo Crazy?), but love the "Pink Panther"esque theme song co-written by Ames and sung by star Jason Schwartzman. Trailer's not half bad, either.

io9: Neil Gaiman let a lucky photographer in to shoot his private library, and the result is awe-inspiring.

Slate: Dear Prudence tackles the question of how to handle a mother who won't stop reading to interact with her daughter because she needs the "escape." (Please let us be better than this.) As a parting shot, she suggests a Bookfinder list of bad mothers in literature, which is about as bitchy and misogynistic as it gets so we're not linking to it.

Emdashes: The official schedule for the 2009 New Yorker Festival has been announced and it is, as usual, a smorgasbord. Most tickets for the October 16-18 events are $25, but here's an insider tip: The signings (scroll down to the bottom) are all free, and in the past have been open to people who don't even have a book to sign, just want to hang out and chat. Much more on this later.

Casting OSCAR WAO

Last night at book club we discussed Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. The group consensus was that if it should take Junot Diaz another 10 years to write a book, then we will stay upon his leisure.

Very briefly, it's not often that I finish a book and immediately want to read it again. When I shut OSCAR WAO I felt like, while the story was over, my acquaintance with Oscar, the nerdy and frustrated title character growing up Dominican in Paterson, New Jersey, was just beginning. The book is written in a style which lends itself to re-reading because it's so dense with cultural allusions, some of which I'm sure I missed in the first pass. If I could compare its style to any other books, I would say it's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE meets MICROSERFS -- without particularly resembling either one of those.

Anyway, I threw out at the meeting that we should try to cast the forthcoming Miramax adaptation, before realizing how little I knew about Dominican-American actors. Since the author and most of the characters in the book are Dominican it would be neat to cast with that in mind, although Hollywood is not always very sensitive to this. (Remember the controversy over "Memoirs of a Geisha" and its pan-Asian cast?) Well, I did my homework and here's what I've got:

Victor Rasuk as Oscar -- I saw Rasuk in a little indie flick called "Raising Victor Vargas" and he really delivered in it. I believe he was in "Stop-Loss" as well although I didn't see it. He'll have to gain weight for the part, though, because a comedic fat suit won't do the trick.
Judy Reyes (Carla on "Scrubs") stepping out of her comedic bubble to play Oscar's sister Lola.
Wilson Jermaine Heredia, from the original cast of "Rent," as Yunior. He's played a transvestite, now let's see if he can play macho.
Zoe Saldana as young Beli
Cam'ron the rapper as The Gangster
Cameo: Oscar de la Renta as Abelard 'cause why not?
and Michelle Rodriguez playing way, way outside type as Ybón (whose role in the book is kind of a spoiler, so I will leave it there).

There are some major holes in this cast, so if you have any ideas for minor characters, let me know.