“Some — by now perhaps all — cultural prizes have had the shine rubbed off them by having been given to undeserving people, an ample number of serious jackasses among them. Everyone knows that the list of writers who did not win the Nobel Prize — Tolstoy, Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden — is much more impressive than the list of those who have. Moreover, there is something about winning the Nobel Prize in literature that makes one posthumous no matter how much longer one goes on to live.”