Kelly Link’s supremely fabulous new YA collection Pretty Monsters, a beautiful object that reads even nicer, officially publishes today. The details from Gavin, including dates for upcoming appearances.

I’ll have an interview with Kelly all about the YA and things related during the upcoming Winter Blog Blast Tour, but that’s no reason to dally on your purchase.

(Also, yeah, Christopher and I did get a little choked up at the new Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror being dedicated to the two of us.)

Let the literary fisticuffs over the Nobel Prize begin:

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year’s award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it’s no coincidence that most winners are European.

"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world . . . not the United States," he said yesterday. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic. "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," said David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker.

"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."

Oh, snap!

The new indie bookshop (which Gavin alerted us to the impending existence of back in February) has been open since July and it’s a testament to the extreme kind of summer and fall we’ve been having that we shamefully only made it by yesterday. Of course, if we’d realized before that it’s literally right across from the co-op… but regrets are for others.*

Anyway, yay for The Morris Book Shop**; we finally have a much-needed great, small indie to shop at. (Technically, the local behemoth Joseph-Beth is an independent bookstore, but it has operated increasingly like a Borders and there are about five now, so it doesn’t feel so local or indie anymore. Not that we have the hate for it, because we don’t, but it’s nice to have an alternative.) The selection was fabulous–top notch YA and SF sections (see camera photo I snapped in the kids/middle grade section’s cool little nook), and just a good range of books in general–and the space is lovely (it’s a former dress shop, but you’d never know it). We chatted with the owners, who were just exactly the kind of book people you want running your local book shop. We will be taking all of you there when you come visit–or better yet, schedule events there and come visit.

We bought: I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (me), The Good Thief (me), Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World (C, and it’s by a local guy), and The Haunted Lands, Book One: Unclean (C).

Long may it rein.

*Although I do regret missing the opening party, which featured a performance by Apples in Stereo leader Robert Schneider.

**Searching to see if the shop had a site, I found this tremendously charming commemorative booklet that was put together in 1912, on the occasion of The Morris Book Shop in Chicago’s 25th anniversary. It was like falling down a wormhole into a little-known pocket of literary history. Frank Morris, the proprietor, seems to have been universally loved, and apparently his shop, over several locations, was a nexus for a certain bohemian literati set (including Eugene Field). The writing in the commemorative book is thoroughly entertaining–equal parts ribbing of Morris and funny passion for books. Here’s a section by Wilbur D. Nesbit near the beginning that I particularly liked:

When a person goes to buy a book he isn’t in the mood he is in when he has to match silk or wants a package of breakfast food. He doesn’t want a salesman dogging his heels and telling him that here is something that is very choice this spring or here is something that is a great favorite with the best people. What he wants is to go a-booking. There is a fellowship with books which cannot be had with anything else that one purchases.

This is the third gem I’ve discovered via Google Books in the last week. All hail.

Updated: Ah ha — Wily proprietor Wyn Morris notifies me that The Morris Book Shop does indeed have a Web site now, and it’s filled with great pics. Isn’t it pretty?