Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl told the AP that Europe still rules when it comes to great literature: the U.S. is "too isolated, too insular." We also don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." (He did not elaborate as to what those important big dialogues were.) Meanwhile, will reclusive Catcher In the Rye author J.D. Salinger receive the Nobel Prize for Lit? Writes a tipster, "I work for PEN in Britain, and there is a rumour here that [the above comments are] an attempt to cover up J.D. Salinger's being on the shortlist for this year's Nobel." [AP via Breitbart]

"I would would love to teach any of the Russians including guys like Babel. Definitely Wilde and Virginia Woolf. I would want to do Illustrated Man by Bradbury. Mafouz, Naipaul, Saramogo, oh and Crab Walk by Günter Grass as a weird interesting look at WWII. Plath is wonderful. I could go on. For me I want to deal with books that in Kafka's words 'wound and stab us.'"—My favorite high school teacher emailing in response to this.**I went to a generally mediocre Catholic high school but every mediocre school has that one cool karate-teaching hardware store-moonlighting teacher whose lectures you would actually rather listen to (obligatory dating of self) than Anderson Cooper on Channel 1 and this one was it.

Catcher in the Rye: Why is every teenager still reading it? So asks an English teacher in Good Magazine who claims its only merits are that it is short, full of cuss words and wholly lacking in references to other books high schoolers have not read. Well, yeah!. Plus there are other literary works that have more cuss words and "social currency" than Catcher in the Rye. Like the Gossip Girl books and Lindsay Lohan's MySpace blog! So why won't it go away?My initial reaction to this would be that we read Catcher In The Rye because everyone on some level at some point loves Catcher In The Rye and we are fast running out of things we can say that about.* I am not quite sure why, I thought to myself upon scanning this essay. But high school will always need Salinger. Maybe because he actually himself had an eating disorder? I wasn't quite sure. And then I read this!

Joyce Maynard, the writer who had a creepy affair with gross old J.D. Salinger when he was 53 and she a mere 18, is still tattling on the egregiously overrated recluse. And it sounds like he has it coming. "[S]he's taking him on again in 'Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial and Overcoming Anorexia,' a series of essays compiled by Kate Taylor. Maynard, without identifying Salinger by name, discusses the relationship she had after her freshman year at Yale with 'a man who liked that I was skinny and, in fact, taught me new tricks to stay that way. Over the year that followed, the relationship grew increasingly difficult for many reasons, but I suspect his policing of my body and my eating was one of them . . . The experience of having another person - even one I loved - telling me what to eat and forbidding certain foods filled me with frustration . . . '"

Reclusive cult novelist J.D. Salinger hated fun. In a 1981 letter to his then-ladyfriend, he wrote: "I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors." Jeez, J.D.. Not since Pynchon trashed Return of the Jedi in Vineland have we been so shocked by a reclusive novelist's distaste for classic '80s blockbusters. [Sly Oyster]