Inside Jacket

Philip Roth, John Banville, and Amos Oz are among the nominees for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Colum McCann, T. J. Stiles, and Keith Waldrop win National Book Awards.

“The Imperial Cruise” argues that Theodore Roosevelt based his foreign policy on odd notions of race.

Junot Diaz failed for five years while writing “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

Big event books get their own movie-style trailers.

Karl Rove’s memoir “Courage and Responsibility” will be published in March.

A Minnesota father spoke only Klingon to his child for three years.

Barack Obama is the subject of more than sixty children’s books.

Barack Obama’s half-brother pens an autobiographical novel.

Do science-fiction writers ever predict the future?

McSweeney’s new issue is all about newspapers.

Publishers Weekly’s all-male top-ten books of 2009 list raises a few eyebrows.

Thomas Jefferson’s foreign policy hinged on the skeleton of a seven-foot moose.

Francisco Ayala, giant of Spanish letters, dies at one-hundred-and-three.

Memoirs haven’t always focussed on scandal.

Chuck Klosterman lists his favorite albums to beat writer’s block.

Over the past few years, thanks to that perfect combination of the Internet and general shamelessness, intrepid collectors have been able to get their hands on all kinds of celebrity merchandise, anything from Manny Ramirez’s gas grill, in 2007, to Pol Pot’s toilet, in 2009.

While neither are included in “Einstein’s Watch: Being an Unofficial Record of a Year’s Most Ownable Things,” plenty of similar items made the cut. The book, written by the fine-art merchants Jolyon Fenwick and Marcus Husselby and coming out in the U.K. next week, includes photographs and descriptions of oddities (celebrity-related or otherwise) bought or sold between July, 2008, and June, 2009. Items range from the Bordeaux vineyard Chateau Latour, bought for six hundred million pounds, to a hundred-billion-dollar banknote issued by Zimbabwe’s central bank, worth only one U.S. dollar.

In a brief foreword, the authors posit that “price, dictated by those with the wherewithal and willingness to pay it, is an unreliable instrument in determining value.” The criteria, it seems, is equal parts cachet and cash-money.

The book’s name refers to a 1930 Longines of Switzerland gold wristwatch given to Einstein in Los Angeles in 1931. The watch, with its owner’s name engraved on the back, sold for more than half a million dollars at auction in New York. The best items, however, are the odd, the luminous, and the oddly luminous. Here’s a sampling:

The Sublime: Steve McQueen’s motorcycle license—issued by the Fédération Internationale Motocycliste—allowed the actor to represent the U.S. at an international bike competition in 1964. Just look at that mug! (It went for forty-seven hundred dollars.)

The Ridiculous: Michael Jackson’s Dance Dance Revolution arcade game went on sale in L.A. shortly after his death, with an estimated value of a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars. The authors speculate, “The owner of this particular machine was presumably in the habit of winning the game.”

The Unfortunate: Pamela Anderson’s swimsuit, carefully preserved since her “Baywatch” days, was offered at auction, with a starting price of two thousand dollars.

The book’s most charming object is an excused-absence note that Barack Obama wrote for ten-year-old Kennedy Corpus, who had skipped school to attend a town-hall event in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The note reads: “To Kennedy’s teacher. Please excuse Kennedy’s absence … she’s with me.” The value? Free; or, perhaps better, priceless.

During the heat of the presidential campaign and the months following Obama’s win, there was a hysteria among collectors looking to snap up signed copies of Barack Obama’s books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope leading up to the sale of a signed first edition Dreams from My Father for a staggering $12,500 shortly after his inauguration.

Over the past couple months it has pretty much been business as usual, until today when, to everyone’s surprise, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Will the announcement spark another flurry of signed Obama book sales? It’s tough to say but this recent announcement makes the signed first edition (although a later printings) copies of The Audacity of Hope seem like a relative bargain when priced at about $400.

In the November 17, 2008, issue of the magazine, David Remnick wrote about race and Barack Obama, citing passages from Obama’s memoir “Dreams from My Father” in a story that explored the nature of his campaign. The memoir, Remnick wrote,

explored his biracial heritage: his white Kansas-born mother, his black Kenyan father, almost completely absent from his life. The memoir is written with more freedom, with greater introspection and irony, than any other by a modern American politician. Obama introduces himself as an American whose childhood took him to Indonesia and Hawaii, whose grandfathers included Hussein Onyango Obama, “a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers.”

Freedom, introspection, irony—is it any wonder, then, that “Dreams from My Father” is the latest Obama project to be targeted by the right wing? Since the Presidential campaign, rumor has circulated among certain constituencies that Bill Ayers was the real author of “Dreams,” but recent comments (read: jokes) made by Ayers have fueled the fire. According to Washington Monthly, National Journal discussed the matter with Ayers at a recent book fair:

When [Ayers] finished speaking, we put the authorship question [on “Dreams from My Father”] right to him. For a split second, Ayers was nonplussed. Then an Abbie Hoffmanish, steal-this-book-sort-of-smile lit up his face. He gently took National Journal by the arm. “Here’s what I’m going to say. This is my quote. Be sure to write it down: ‘Yes, I wrote “Dreams from My Father.” I ghostwrote the whole thing. I met with the president three or four times, and then I wrote the entire book.’” He released National Journal’s arm, and beamed in Marxist triumph. “And now I would like the royalties.”

Ayers made a similar claim to a conservative blogger. Think it’s clear that he’s fooling around? Dennis Byrne, on his chicagonow.com blog, writes:

This is no small matter. We have been lead to believe that Obama’s eloquence is his strength, his trump card. Is it possible that all of this is a charade? A gigantic lie?

Silver lining: at least the debacle acknowledges that writing a book is an accomplishment.