Inside Jacket

“There are so many sports, let’s see… I could bowl, jump hurdles, or water ski”: the story behind the lost Dr. Seuss manuscript.

Vintage Classics will produce a series of books with 3-D covers.

A British judge refused to throw out a suit accusing J.K. Rowling of plagiarism.

“The ordeal is part of the commitment”: Philip Roth returns to the Newark of his boyhood.

Can books be compared to works of art?

An epic Victorian feast in honor of Fanny Farmer’s “Boston Cooking School Cookbook.”

It’s the zeitgeist: how tuition costs are driving students away from the humanities.

Simon Armitage has won the Keats-Shelley prize for his poem “The Present.”

Take a spin through fiction’s best bicycles.

This weekend, I read the first hundred-odd pages of “The Finkler Question,” by Howard Jacobson. I did this not because I had a premonition that Jacobson’s latest novel would win the 2010 Man Booker Prize this evening—as my colleagues noted last week, Tom McCarthy was such an odds-on favorite that Ladbrokes had stopped taking wagers—but because I’m a Howard Jacobson fan. I’ve been one ever since I fell for “The Mighty Walzer,” which may just be the best ping-pong coming-of-age novel of all time. Also, I’d just finished reading a new collection of stories and letters by Vasily Grossman, the earnest, precise, and moral Soviet writer who, as a war correspondent, covered Stalingrad and discovered Treblinka, and who never lived to see the publication of his masterpiece, “Life and Fate.” After Grossman, I could certainly use a laugh.

In announcing the prize, Sir Andrew Motion, the chairman of this year’s panel, mentioned that “The Finkler Question” is “funny,” and much is already being made of Jacobson having written the first “comic novel” to win a Booker. Jacobson can be ribald and play with language—in “Kalooki Nights,” the protagonist keeps falling for women with a diaeresis in their name (Zoë, Chloë, Alÿs)—but he does not write light humor. “The Finkler Question” so far is the story of three friends: two Jewish widowers and Julian Treslove, an even more mournful fellow, even though he never married and isn’t Jewish, at least when the novel begins. But as events unfold, Treslove starts to think that he might be, or that others think he is. His private word for Jew is Finkler—his schoolmate, rival, and one of the widowers. The Finkler Question, in other words, is the Jewish Question—which is also at the heart of “Kalooki NIghts,” “The Mighty Walzer,” his travelogue “Roots Schmoots” (which became a BBC series), and his opinion column for the Independent.

There will also be much talk about how Jacobson is the British Philip Roth (Darkly funny! Obsessed with Jewish identity! Dysfunctional relationships with women!). And how they are not the same writer; there are analogies (Jacobson : Manchester :: Roth : Newark) and differences (Roth has shifted his focus to his nation’s history and to mortality, while Jacobson has not moved on, or cannot). Another difference is that Roth has acquired a level of international respect and attention that Jacobson may or may not dream of, and will probably never attain. But in the past few days, Roth, once again a long shot for the Nobel Prize, did not win, and Jacobson, another dark horse, has won the Booker.

Let’s hope that this recognition for “The Finkler Question,” which was published in the United States today, gets Jacobson the recognition he deserves—not as a comic novelist, or a Jewish novelist, or a British Philip Roth—but on his own terms.

Nineteenth-century novelist, twenty-first-century slums: on reading Dickens in Lagos.

Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” explains how to write like a cartoonist.

Why the javelin throw? On a curious plot similarity between Philip Roth’s “Nemesis” and Sam Lipsyte’s “The Ask.”

Seven authors who wrote while nude.

“Operation Dark Heart”: how the government’s attempt at censorship turned out to be good for the publishing industry.

Mark Peters makes a case for banning the word “natural.”

Facebook for scholars: universities are building social networks to facilitate academic discussions among students, faculty, and staff.

“A tradition of troublemaking”: Lee Siegel compares Tea Party activists to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats.

Where do good ideas come from?

Science may be able to explain why we love our favorite stories, but it can never replace them.

How award season makes literature into a competitive sport.

“Truth, delivered quickly and fearlessly”: the Chicago Tribune’s Julia Keller on what critics are good for.

Laura Miller: Bill Bryson’s “At Home” may “ultimately be a bit pointless, but damn if it isn’t a lot of fun all the same.”

How a former Mormon missionary came to write the conclusion of Robert Jordan’s thirteen-book fantasy epic.

HarperCollins U.K. apologizes to Jonathan Franzen for printing thousands of error-ridden copies of “Freedom.”

Philip Roth tells the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t know what causes me to want to imagine some hell that didn’t happen.”

Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist whose depiction of the Prophet Muhammad sparked protests in the Muslim world, narrowly avoided assassination by hiding in a panic room.

Katie Roiphe asks why some readers hate the sex scenes written by writers such as Philip Roth and John Updike.

Robyn Okrant writes about the year she spent following all of Oprah’s advice.

A new biography of Winston Churchill calls him the “most valuable to humanity” among twentieth-century leaders.

E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, and others gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library to demand the release of Liu Xiaobo from prison in China.

Steven Solomon’s new book, “Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization,” argues that water has become the earth’s most precious resource.