I'm a couple days late catching up with this, but I'm still astounded that the Nobel Prize committee's top jurist, Horace Engdahl, could say that U.S. citizens receive few literature awards because American writing is insular, and Europe is still the center of the literary world. Excuse me?! I'm glad that New Yorker editor David Remnick pointed out that the Nobels had snubbed Joyce, Nabokov, and Proust, making them all but insignificant in identifying great literature.I read a lot of European, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian literature, and I am far from a rah-rah U.S. guy, but if Engdahl's short list doesn't include Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, the late great David Foster Wallace, Neal Stephenson, Richard Powers, etc., there's a permanent crease in his right and wrong. But then, Engdahl does not seem to be a man of great mental capacity.
