As 2012 draws to a close, we thought we would take a moment to examine the scuffles, controversies, and feisty debates that have helped keep Page-Turner’s daily book-news roundups interesting over the past year. Some of these conflicts show what happens when carelessness leads to comedy; others grow out of a deeper sense of anxiety about the state of literary culture; in several instances, Page-Turner even entered the fray. In any case, they are proof that the literary world still loves a good fight, which we take as a sign of ruddy good health.

Günter Grass vs. Israel

In April, the Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass became persona non grata in Israel after publishing a poem, entitled “What Must Be Said,” which denounced the country for threatening to use nuclear force against Iran (“Why do I say only now, aged and with my last drop of ink, that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace?”) Grass, who has admitted that he served in the Waffen-SS as a teen-ager, clarified that he meant to criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, not Israel itself. But two days later, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced that Grass was being barred from the country. “His distorted poems are not welcome in Israel,” said Yishai. “I suggest he try them in Iran where he will find a sympathetic audience.” The following week, Dave Eggers decided not to attend the ceremony awarding him the Günter Grass Foundation’s forty-thousand euro Albatross prize, saying that he was happy to receive the award but felt that the ceremony should have been postponed until the controversy had died down.

The Pulitzer Prize Board vs. The Fiction Jurors

David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King,” Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams,” and Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!” were all in the running for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction but, in April, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that for the first time in thirty-five years it would not award a fiction prize. “The three books were fully considered, but in the end, none mustered the mandatory majority for granting a prize, so no prize was awarded,” said the prize administrator Sig Gissler. Fiction juror Susan Larson said in an interview on NPR that the jury was “shocked … angry … and very disappointed” at the board’s decision. At Page-Turner, another juror, Michael Cunningham, expressed similar disappointment and broke down the process by which he and the other jurors had arrived at their short list after reading over three hundred novels and short-story collections. “We were enormously pleased with the artfulness and fearlessness and unorthodox beauties of the books we’d decided to nominate,” he wrote.

Nook’d vs. Kindled in “War and Peace”

Barnes & Noble was briefly suspected of employing an outrageous anti-Amazon marketing strategy in May after blogger Philip Howard noticed that a version of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” sold by the chain store had substituted “nook” for every instance of the word “kindle” throughout the text, resulting in sentences like, “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….” The e-book turned out to have been published by a third-party company, Superior Formatting Publishing, who issued an apology (still posted on the company’s Web home page) explaining that it had accidentally applied the “find and replace” function to the entire text when reformatting the Kindle version of the book for the Nook platform.

The Vatican vs. Sister Margaret Farley

Public debates over women’s health and gay marriage this year exposed the increasing ideological divisions within the Catholic Church, most notably in April when the Vatican reprimanded the country’s largest group of Catholic nuns for promoting “radical feminist” ideas incompatible with church teachings. A similar divide caused a ripple in the book world in June, when the Vatican issued a “notification” condemning the award-winning 2006 book “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” by the prominent nun and theologian Sister Margaret Farley, saying that Farley’s ideas on homosexuality, masturbation, and divorce posed “grave harm to the faithful.” (The book states, for example, that “same-sex oriented persons as well as their activities can and should be respected.”) After a day of news stories about the incident, the book jumped to number sixteen on the Amazon best-seller list.

Marc Smirnoff vs. The Oxford American

The Oxford American became embroiled in scandal over the summer when founding editor Marc Smirnoff was fired by the Southern literary magazine’s board of directors after staff members accused him of sexual harassment (one intern claimed, and Smirnoff didn’t deny it, that he asked if she wanted to hold hands and told her that he wanted to take her to his favorite “make-out spot” on the way home from a work retreat). Smirnoff and his girlfriend Carol Ann Fitzgerald, who was also fired from the magazine, were outraged by the allegations, and by what they considered unfair press reports about the incident. In response, they published a lengthy self-defense on a Web site they created for the purpose. The magazine later hired Roger D. Hodge, a Texas native and former editor of Harper’s, to succeed Smirnoff, and has since resumed publishing.

The debate over negative criticism

In August, Jacob Silverman wrote an article at Slate which argued that social media was creating a surplus of niceness in today’s book world. Silverman’s essay, along with two negative book reviews in the New York Times Book Review later in the month, sparked a lively debate about the function of positive and negative criticism in literary culture. Critics at Salon, the Times, the Awl and The New Yorker weighed in, writing pieces in favor or against bad reviews. At Page-Turner, Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Critic’s Manifesto” summed up the discussion and argued that the critic’s role is to “mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience,” an endeavor that sometimes requires honest, thoughtful negativity. “Any call to eliminate negative reviewing,” he wrote, “is to infringe catastrophically on the larger project of criticism: if a critic takes seriously his obligation to pass judgments—which, merely statistically, are likely to have to be negative as well as positive—his sense of responsibility to those judgments and their significance has to outweigh all other considerations.”

#sorryfeminists

“The sexy (sorry, feminists), smart, sassy Katie Roiphe live on stage @nypl on Wednesday night.” After T magazine editor Deborah Needleman made this announcement on Twitter in October, users responded by creating the hashtag #sorryfeminists to make fun of the tweet’s implication that feminism and sexiness are antithetical. The result was a series of cleverly biting tweets from Irin Carmon, Jessica Valenti, Anna Holmes, and many others (“Thought about shoes. #sorryfeminists”; “Shaved my pits last night #sorryfeminists”) and, soon thereafter, the inevitable GIF Tumblr, announced by Ann Friedman on Twitter a short few hours after Needleman’s offending tweet.

The Faulkner Estate vs. Woody Allen

In October, William Faulkner’s estate sued Sony Pictures Classics for copyright infringement over Woody Allen’s unauthorized paraphrasing of Faulkner’s famous line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” in his 2011 movie “Midnight in Paris.” (In the film, the protagonist, played by Owen Wilson, says, “The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party.”) In response, Sony issued a statement calling the lawsuit “frivolous” and expressing confidence that it would win the case; two weeks ago the studio filed a motion asking that the case be dismissed.