This is the fifth year The Morning News has held this glorious competition, which is judged by readers and all sorts of literary people, including wonderboy Junot Diaz, who won last year.

From the TOB website:

“We mention this because the Tournament of Books is one of those concepts that only could have been conceived and subsequently executed by people who used to drink a lot but now drink considerably less. In the absence of too much alcohol, it never would have occurred to us that we should take 16 of the most celebrated and highly touted novels of the year, seed them in a March Madness-type bracket, conscript them into a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence,” and, in honor of David Sedaris’s brother, present the author of the winning book a live rooster.”

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy came out on top this year, winning over Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge. The big question is: what will she do with her newly gained live rooster? Eat it? Keep it as a pet? Kill it and stuff it as an eternal trophy of her success?

Image from The Morning News

Today, Phelps will be in our Big Apple supporting his latest work of literary non-fiction, No Limits: The Will to Succeed, which the New York Review of Books called a “salacious hybrid of Infinite Jest and 1960s Norman Mailer, with a dash of Marquez’s flair for the supernatural.”

But really. The winningest Olympian of all time will be at Barnes & Noble tonight at 7:30 p.m. for a free, all ages reading in which a third grader will likely have to narrate due to the big ol’ words Phelps’ ghostwriter snuck in there. Don’t miss it. Oh, and buy the book or the terrorists win.

“Someone call 911!” someone shouted.

Delaney, a veteran of perilously over-crowded, jungle-aired literary events, kept reading in his strange, somehow soothing, completely ignorable, rising and retreating cadence, and the woman quickly recovered. It was the heat and maybe the booze—not Delaney’s story “about a black, gay, poet who lived in this area” (lower Manhattan)—that caused it. Not to harp on Delaney, but it was nothing to fall down about. He’s best know for his science fiction, work which even Díaz says “drove [him] in part to be a writer.”

Solas had it set up so that Díaz and Delaney each read twice, once upstairs and once downstairs because they didn’t have enough space. Díaz came up just as the paramedics were leaving with the (perfectly fine) girl and said, “Let’s do this thing.”

Delaney finished up, and—after a traditional soupy introduction probably comparable to the lavish praise I layered on in my review of Oscar Wao— Díaz got on the mic. “This really ain’t shit,” he schooled the crowd. “It’s not that hot… In Santo Domingo this shit would be legitimate, man. So you all can fucking write this down in your journals”—now, in the squeaky voice of the typical male student audience member—“That was some bugged out shit, man.” But, in Santo Domingo, “we get bugged.” (One could hear the pens already scratching on the slick paper of a hundred Moleskines.)

Díaz had to borrow a book from a kid in the audience, telling the people around them to make sure they got him some drinks, because “Guys, honestly, I’m the guy that always gets stole on.” Someone, in the rush after his first reading, made off with Díaz’s own copy of his own book.

After apologizing to all the people who haven’t yet read his Pulitzer winning novel, he went on to read two scenes from the very end. Surprise! Oscar dies. If it weren’t for the guy next to me stroking and smoothing his girlfriend’s ponytail, I might have been even more moved by Díaz’s reading of the last 27 days of Oscar’s life than I was the first time I read it. His speaking voice, unlike Delaney’s, is strong, clear, and always cool.

In the Q & A afterward, someone—and, God, I hope he was from the New School—asked, “What percentage of Yunior is you?” And Díaz, baller that he is, corrected the eye-rolling crowd. Saying, on the contrary, that “it’s a good question” because “You write to escape and you write to explore yourself. These are the two tensions. Yunior is a grotesque expansion of everything I am… I’m just too much of a chicken to be that evil.” And went on, “Guys, I’m fucked up, man. I wrote the book!”

Someone else—and this too was inevitable, so maybe Díaz’s spot on response was a little prepared—asked how much he changed over the 11 years (that’s right, 11 years) he spent writing Oscar. His response was enough to chill any aspiring writer, and he delivered it, as always, with sincere originality:

“This book—11 years of failure—took all the arrogance out of me. What I learned was that I was lucky to finish [it], and, really, I’m not all that good.”

To the last comment—You might say so, Junot, but the Pulitzer and the crowd and the girls who cried at the end of your reading won’t have it. If they have to, they’ll wait another 11 for the next.

Díaz’s prose is keen and flexible, erudite but down to earth. As you may have gathered from his recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Díaz is unassuming, and the book reflects the philosophy of writing he explained to the LAist. “Being against a language form is just as absurd as Canute the Beast trying to order or command the sea.” He’s an all inclusive writer “looking for excuses to deploy all sorts of language.” He employs a compelling array of characters to fit the bill.

The book’s title character, Oscar, is an overweight Dominican from New Jersey who dreams of being the next J.R.R. Tolkein and—NYU ladies will have sympathy here—just dying to get some action. Oscar’s vocabulary will make your proud of your three years of high school Spanish and, simultaneously, the days you spent holed up in your room reading the Lord of the Rings and imagining friends who were as interested in Dungeons and Dragons as you were.

If that’s not your bag, how about the story of Beli, Oscar’s mother, who loved a gangster and fucked him until her “pussy was a mango-juice swamp”? Or maybe history’s your thing. Well, don’t worry, as Díaz puts it, the Dominican Republic is “a blessed meridian where mar and sol and green have forged their union and produced a stubborn people that no mount of highfalutin prose can generalize.” His portrayal of the Trujillo era of the DR is both thorough and horrifyingly fascinating. If you’re a little more on the pragmatic side, then the voice of the sometimes narrator and all-time lady’s man, Yunior, should keep you satisfied. Granted, things can get a little far fetched, but you have to remember that your dealing with a self-professed sci-fi geek.

After nine years of work, one has to expect that Oscar, as he is for Yunior, is to some degree Díaz’s attempt to break from “Fukú”—a potentially inescapable “curse or a doom of some kind.” At times, the novel is so much fun that you overlook how finely chiseled and delicately wrought it is. But really, whether you go for a quick or close reading, whether you’re black, white, Hispanic, Asian, whether a lady’s man or virgin, a sci-fi nerd, history buff, or just a plain old student, you’ll be hard pressed not to gain something from Díaz and Oscar Wao.

Good question, Mom.

Bloggers are notorious for weaving details of their personal lives into long-winded diatribes analyzing everything from the taste of the soup at that Asian place down the street to the sad, complicated meaning of life. For this, we appreciate them, but we cannot separate their writing from their personalities. If we hate them as people then we are going to hate their writing, too—it is generally about them as people, even when it is consciously trying not to be.

But the thing about authors is that you can get away with liking their writing without actually liking them as people. Which is a good thing, because it seems like a lot of them were (and are) assholes.

There is a distance with the printed word that is lacking in the blogosphere. I really liked what Hemingway said about Paris, but after four wives and countless short stories involving women who are only there to provide moral and sexual support, it’s like, “God, Ernest, you are such a dick.”

Then, earlier today I was lamenting the fact that I will never get into the advanced fiction class that Jonathan Safran Foer is teaching at NYU this spring, mostly because I am lazy and did not even apply. My friend then turned to me and said, “His writing is beautiful, but I met Jonathan Safran Foer and that guy is a douchebag. I mean, it’s not his fault—he got famous very young, but he told everyone in my class that he thinks his books are more classic than novels like Catcher in the Rye.”

My heart sank a little because I cried for quite a long time after reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and I thought Everything is Illuminated was jarring in its poignancy, but that was kind of an asshole thing for him to say, right? And speaking of Catcher in the Rye, didn’t Salinger refuse to act civilly towards, um, anyone, and didn’t he also encourage Joyce Maynard’s eating disorder?

Maybe I am overgeneralizing. Okay, I’m overgeneralizing. But it certainly does seem like step one to becoming an author is to be an asshole, or at least have the capacity to be an asshole, and then unleash that capacity once your first book advance comes in.

I would like for someone to disprove this theory because there is nothing more disheartening than finding out someone whose words you swear were stolen straight from your soul wrote them one night after drunkenly giving his wife a black eye. So has anyone met any famous authors that were lovely? Please?

Photo by George Karger (Time Life/Getty)

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.