The Literary Saloon brings news that online oddsmaker Ladbrokes is taking bets on who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here are the odds:

* Amos Oz 4/1
* Assia Djebar 5/1
* Luis Goytisola 6/1
* Joyce Carol Oates 7/1
* Philip Roth 7/1
* Adonis 8/1
* Antoni Tabucchi 9/1
* Claudio Magris 9/1
* Haruki Murakami 9/1
* Thomas Pynchon 9/1

Personally, I think Philip Roth is the Susan Lucci of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's becoming a bad joke by now. So my vote is that he won't win this time. I'd love to see Murakami or Pynchon win. I also like the list of people who are tied for 100/1 odds:

Beryl Bainbridge, Cormac McCarthy, David Malouf, Eeva Kilpi, Ernesto Cardenal, F. Sionil Jose, Ian McEwan, John Banville, Jonathan Littell, Julian Barnes, Kjell Askildsen, Marge Piercy, Mary Gordon, Maya Angelou, Michel Tournier, Patrick Modiano, Paul Auster, Rosalind Belben, William H Gass.

I like those odds. That's actually a very good list of authors; you could pick up a book by just about any one of those long shots and enjoy it tremendously.