Looks like you can use those SAS frequent flyer miles for something else, Philip. All award nerds and bored literary columnists can thank Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the literature jury for the Nobel Prize, for stirring things up today with his comments that Americans aren't qualified for the big prize they haven't won since 1993:

Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States.... The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

Continue Reading: http://www.omnivoracious.com/2008/09/nobel-to-us-dro.html