Photo by ktylerconk
As the NCAA’s March Madness approaches, here’s another bracket to wrap your literary brains around… The 2008 Tournament of Books!
Here’s a synopsis of the Tournament’s inception from The Morning News:
A few years ago some of us were up late and we were talking about this very thing, about how much we enjoy literary awards in spite of the fact they are also silly and arbitrary. The idea that we should accept the word of any small group of people—people in most cases whose names we don’t even know—about a topic so subjective as the best literature of the year is pretty ridiculous, and forcing authors to compete against each other is just stupid on its face. We were also drinking quite a lot, which I mention because by the next morning we had the rough outlines of something called The Tournament of Books, in which we would seed the year’s most celebrated works of fiction in a March Madness-type bracket and pit those novels against each other in a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence.” In honor of our favorite character in contemporary literature, David Sedaris’s brother, aka “The Rooster,” we decided to present the winning author with a live chicken.
So far, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke has beaten Jeff Parker’s Ovenman, with a decisive K.O. (Personally, I just couldn’t drag myself through yet another dark, disturbing foray into the human psyche ala Vietnam and breathed a sigh of relief when I put Smoke aside after 50 pages, but most call it a “masterpiece”).
Today, Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name defeated Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. I haven’t read either, but was nevertheless relieved by the outcome since Detectives was a 2007 media darling like Smoke, and I was afraid the bracket would simply follow the favorites.
Want to participate? Download this year’s bracket!
By the way, the tournament’s sponsor, Powells.com, has discounted each of this year’s contestants by 30%.
