NP Moody news

[Doug Millison]

It was something that would have normally gone unnoticed: Rick Moody won a
literary award.

Except that soon thereafter -- in October of 2000 -- a group of five
writers and zine publishers from around the country met in Hoboken, New
Jersey. They were there to 1) conduct a two-day pub crawl in a city
legendary for its bars, and 2) figure out what, exactly, would be the first
activity of a new group they'd just formed -- The Underground Literary
Alliance. [...] And at their Hoboken get-together, they did indeed decide
to go after Moody about the Guggenheim. Moody, Wenclas explains, was not
only a successful author, whose novel "The Ice Storm" had been turned into
a successful motion picture. He was also a millionaire already, the scion
of a banking family so rich he lived on a private island. That he'd not
only applied for, but been awarded, a $35,000 award intended to enable
writers to write without having to take on a day job, Wenclas says, was "an
example of what's wrong with the whole system. The New York literary world
is an incestuous system, a very small, cliquish world."

continues at
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12643