Cantankerous Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul, who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker, lets us know that we've "quite simply" used up our allotment of awesome writers: "Publishing has gone down in quality so much in recent years and the problem is that there is no literary life any more because there are quite simply no more great writers." To further undermine his point, he called the attendees of a book fair "incredibly ugly."

In an essay in the NYT Book Review two weeks ago, many Trinidadians said they assumed Naipaul "hated" the country because of his refusal to play "proud native son"—writing things like, "History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies." (Middle Passage, 1962.)