So, have you read anything by this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio? Well, neither have 87% of the over 7,000 surveyors who responded to a poll on the Nobel’s own website.

The Nobel in Literature in recent years has been received with a great big yawn in America. An American author hasn’t won the prestigious prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and even that hasn’t cemented her place in the canon. But it doesn’t come as much of a shock: weeks before the prize was announced Horace Engdahl, the academy’s permanent secretary, told the Associated Press that American Literature was “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” He went on to say that Europe was still the center of the literary world.

So while American heavyweights Roth, DeLillo and Pynchon will have to wait another year, they, and the rest of America don’t really have to pay attention: this is the same Nobel that neglected Joyce, Nabokov, and Proust.

This post was submitted by Brett Sharetts.