That wacky Nobel committee

The Nobel Prize in Literature may or may not be announced a week from Thursday. (We never really know, as it's tradition to keep the date of the announcement a secret until 48 hours ahead of time.)

Nobel permanent secretary Horace Engdahl says that it's unlikely the winner will be an American:

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.

Nine of the last 13 Nobel Laureates have been European writers.

New Yorker editor David Remnick responds with a red, white, and blue bitch slap:

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.