Well, I could have congratulated National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon on her excellent taste in graduate schools, but she told a crowd in Brooklyn on Wednesday it was the proximity to horse-racing tracks that made her decision, so... In other last-week NBA news, Patti Smith announced she is working on a follow-up to memoir JUST KIDS -- a curiosity since the book covers her whole life, but I can think of some years that might be well fleshed out.

That's National Book Award Winner Patti Smith to you

It's true! Smith nabbed the nonfiction prize at the American publishing fiesta held here in New York for her book JUST KIDS. During her acceptance speech she cried and reminded the audience that she worked in a bookstore when she first arrived in New York.

On the fiction shelf, Jaimy Gordon's LORDS OF MISRULE pulled a surprising upset -- so much so that to all accounts I have seen, she didn't have a speech prepared. Much congratulations also to Kathryn Erskine and Terrance Hayes for taking home the big ones in young-adult fiction and poetry, respectively.

Not to be outdone by some young punk kid, Tom Wolfe sang part of "The Girl From Ipanema" during his speech. Really. He really did that. Do they make white-on-white Hawaiian shirts these days?

Amazon Picks 10 Best Books of 2010

Preempting Publishers Weekly's list, typically the earliest, by about four days. New-media whippersnappers!

Strong disagreement here over #7 and I've never even heard of MATTERHORN. I guess it's time to start working on my own list. What do you all say?

My dream Patti Smith/ JUST KIDS index

• Thrift Store Clothing Scores
• Meals Eaten At The Automat
• Tantalizing One-Line Descriptions of Explicit Mapplethorpe Photos Which Do Not Appear In The Book
• Max's Kansas City*
• Times Robert Mapplethorpe Said "Patti, no!"
• Bookstores Smith Worked In
• Times People Mistook Smith For A Lesbian
• Times People Mistook Smith For A Drug User
• Hey, Did You Know Blue Öyster Cult Used To Be A Legitimate Band
• Memorials Held For Famous People Who Died In The 1960s
• Haircuts And Their Meaning
• "Saw A Double Rainbow" (okay, one citation: p. 273)

*Most confusingly named venue... ever?

National Book Award finalists announced

Stay tuned for the big upset.

Fiction: 
Peter Carey, PARROTT & OLIVIER IN AMERICA (read it, liked it!)
Nicole Krauss, GREAT HOUSE (hear good things)
Lionel Shriver, SO MUCH FOR THAT (hear good things, like the author)
Jaimy Gordon, LORD OF MISRULE (never heard of it
Karen Tei Yamashita, I HOTEL (never heard of it)

Nonfiction:
Barbara Demick, NOTHING TO ENVY: ORDINARY LIVES IN NORTH KOREA (never heard of it)
John W. Dower, CULTURES OF WAR: PEARL HARBOR, HIROSHIMA, 9-11, IRAQ (never heard of it)
Justin Spring, SECRET HISTORIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAMUEL STEWARD (never heard of it)
Megan K. Stack, EVERY MAN IN THIS VILLAGE IS A LIAR: AN EDUCATION IN WAR (never heard of it)
Patti Smith, JUST KIDS (what!!!!!)

The ceremony's November 17th and Tom Wolfe will be getting a special achievement award. Check out the website if you want to read up on the finalists and the poetry/YA categories.

Bookstore In Name Only

If you're walking in the West Village for long enough, chance dictates that you will eventually run into a storefront with the name Marc Jacobs on it. A very popular fashion designer among a certain set of young beautiful people (mostly in New York and other cities), who works under his own name and for certain Louis Vuitton lines, Jacobs started with one boutique and now has several -- the double-storefront across from the cupcake shop, the kids' store, and now, this:



I had never seen Bookmarc until last weekend on a postbrunch walk, but it is a bookstore only in the sense that Urban Outfitters could also be called a bookstore because it sells books. The books are window dressing, to get you into the store so you can get your hands on the real goods. It would be more accurate to call it a Bookstore In Name Only, in the sense that some museum bookstores have drifted that way, because spinning racks of postcards take up an awful lot of room.

In the case of Bookmarc, the real goods are a depressing array of branded tote bags (most in beachy brights, unbecoming to people I think of as style icons) and keychains, a truck-stop-sized assortment of keychains. I wouldn't be surprised if the store started personalizing them on the premises soon.

There were books; of course there were books; there were blank books trussed up like the Penguin classic editions with puns even I couldn't enjoy like THE GAY GATSBY; there were novelty notepads. There were a few copies of Patti Smith's JUST KIDS (which my expedition partner noted is actually a really good book, and whose author is not to blame for this mess, and might even bemoan it right here along with me) turned inefficiently face-out in a shelf. There were remainder-sized art books. But no one was buying them, they were all at the register, paying for their keychains.

The arrival of Bookmarc was particularly painful for the neighborhood because it bumped out the 24-year tenant Biography Bookshop. (EDIT: A commenter points out that Biography is not dead, just in a new location -- with the new name bookbook.) With the guilt of the gentrified I admit, I never went there -- and now it's too late. First they came for the other storefronts, and I didn't speak up... et cetera.

Photo of Bookmarc: slamxhype