A couple of months ago I posted about the longlist for the Lettre Ulysses Award, a prize that is given to the best book-length reporting. They have since announced the winner and runners-up, and this year the award went to The People on the Street: A Writer’s View of Israel by Linda Grant. Her book is a ground level view of life in Israel, placing it in counterpoint to the scads of books that look at the region from 35,000 feet. In an excerpt, we read about the reaction on the street in Tel Aviv when people found out that Saddam had been captured.
2006 Lettre Ulysses Winner
Shortlist unveiled for richest short story prize
This morning the Guardian points to the shortlist for the National Short Story Prize, a British contest that attracted more than 1,400 entries. The point of the contest is to “re-establishing the importance of the British short story,” and as such there are some recognizable names on the shortlist to get people interested, including master of the form William Trevor and novelists Rose Tremain and Michel Faber. Also making the list is James Lasdun whose book The Horned Man I very much admired. The Guardian story has some very brief excerpts of the stories, and BBC 4 (one of the organizers of the Prize) has bios of the shortlisted writers. BBC4 will be broadcasting readings of the five stories from the April 10th to the 15th, a unique idea that is especially suited to short stories, and the winner – to receive 15,000 pounds – will be unveiled on May 15th. I hope they put the text of the stories online at some point, too.Update: Found some links related to the final stories, and I thought I’d share.”Men of Ireland” by Trevor was originally published in the New Yorker. James Tata writes about the story here.”The Safehouse” by Faber was discussed at Bookworld. The story appeared in Faber’s collection, Farenheit Twins.”The Anxious Man” by Lasdun appeared in The Paris Review #173. They’re sold out but Amazon has a couple of copies“The Ebony Hand” by Tremain will be part of a collection called The Darkness of Wallis Simpson in December. The collection is already out in England, and there’s a brief synopsis of the story at readingadventures (scroll down).”Flyover” by Rana Dasgupta is in the collection Tokyo Cancelled.Some thoughts on the story prize from Tim Worstall.
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Denis Johnson Wins 2007 National Book Award
Last year we noted that by honoring William T. Vollmann in 2005 and then Richard Powers the following year, the National Book Award seemed to be making a move toward “honoring some of the names on the leading edge of American fiction,” as opposed to the old guard or the merely obscure. One could say that the NBA has always filled this roll, but it seemed to have lost its focus in the years before 2005, particularly in 2004, when five relative unknowns were nominated for the fiction prize and the entire literary community seemed collectively bewildered.The NBA has stayed true to form, however, in 2007 with a strong slate of nominees and with this year’s fiction winner, named last night, Denis Johnson, for his Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke. In discussing the finalists, we called Johnson the “presumptive favorite,” and he was a favorite that many readers seemed to want to win. We have a review of the book available, and curious readers can also check out an excerpt. With Johnson away on assignment in Iraq, his wife accepted the award for him.Moving to the other categories, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A. (excerpt) took home the non-fiction prize, beating out Christopher Hitchens. Sherman Alexie, whose adult fiction has never made the cut for the fiction award, was a winner in the Young People’s Literature category for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (excerpt). The poetry award went to Robert Hass for Time and Materials (poem).For more on the award ceremony, check out the Times writeup. And Ed, who attended with several other bloggers, offered his own coverage as well.
National Book Award Winners Announced
The winners of the 2006 National Book Awards have been announced. A year after William T. Vollmann won the fiction award it has gone to Richard Powers for The Echo Maker (excerpt), marking a shift in focus (though perhaps not yet a “trend”) toward honoring some of the names on the leading edge of American fiction. The New York Times, in its writeup, mentions that “as in recent years, the fiction category raised eyebrows in the publishing industry for its lack of commercially known nominees in a year of big-name authors,” but I don’t recall hearing much rumbling about the nominees. If anything, as I wrote when the nominees were announced, this year’s nominees “satisfyingly occupy the sweet spot between obscurity and being, well, too obvious.” And if one looks at the bodies of work of the five nominees, as well as their literary reputations, Powers was certainly deserving of this plaudit. Judging on his book alone, from what I’ve heard, he is a worthy winner, as well.In nonfiction, the award went to Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (excerpt) taking on a very important topic in American history that hasn’t gotten much attention from the writers of popular history. The Young People’s Literature award was given to M.T. Anderson for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (excerpt), sparing us the possibility of an angry backlash against those darn graphic novels. And for Poetry, the award was given to Nathaniel Mackey for Splay Anthem (poem).
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Awards Mania: National Book Award Finalists
The Booker was awarded Monday, the Nobel Prize will be awarded tomorrow, and today this year’s National Book Award finalists were announced (by John Grisham, no less). Last year the National Book Foundation was vehemently criticized by some and defended by others for nominating five relatively unknown women from New York in the fiction category, but there will likely be less controversy this year as big name (and past winner for World’s Fair in 1986) E.L. Doctorow leads the list. As the Amazon rankings at the time of the announcement indicate, the Mary Gaitskill doesn’t exactly qualify as obscure either. Though not a commercial superstar, another notable nominee is William T. Vollmann. The complete list of nominees in all categories follows:FictionE.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House) (rank: 17)Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon) (rank: 786)Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (rank: 45,062)Rene Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow) (rank: 423,858)William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking) (rank: 51,709)NonfictionAlan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin)Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books)Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)PoetryJohn Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco)Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press)W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)Vern Rutsala, The Moment’s Equation (Ashland Poetry Press)Young People’s LiteratureJeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf)Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam)Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum)Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest)Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt)
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2010 National Book Award Finalists Announced
Award season is hitting its stride, and this year’s National Book Award finalists have been announced. This year’s fiction list includes something of an invasion from overseas, with Peter Carey, surely the first Booker shortlister to also be a National Book Award finalist (but eligible for both because the Australian-born author is now a U.S. citizen), and Lionel Shriver, who, though a U.S. citizen is often more commonly associated with London, where she makes her home.
The nomination for Shriver validates a provactively titled piece that ran in these pages this year, Lionel Shriver: America’s Best Writer?, which suggested that she deserves far more critical attention. Rounding out the fiction list are Nicole Krauss, recently lauded as a New Yorker “20 Under 40” writer, and a pair of relative unknowns Jaimy Gordon and Karen Tei Yamashita, each writing for small indie presses, McPherson and Coffee House, respectively. Also notable, the fiction finalist number four women versus one male author, and Jonathan Franzen and his blockbuster literary novel Freedom are nowhere to be found.
The other big name to note is rocker Patti Smith, who earned a nod for her memoir.
Here’s a list of the finalists in all four categories with bonus links and excerpts where available:
Fiction:
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (excerpt)
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
Great House by Nicole Krauss (excerpt)
So Much for That by Lionel Shriver (excerpt)
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (excerpt)
Nonfiction:
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (excerpt)
Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq by John W. Dower (excerpt)
Just Kids by Patti Smith (excerpt)
Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward by Justin Spring (excerpt)
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack (excerpt)
Poetry:
The Eternal City by Kathleen Graber (excerpt [pdf])
Lighthead by Terrance Hayes (poem)
By the Numbers by James Richardson (poem)
One with Others by C.D. Wright (poems)
Ignatz by Monica Youn (poem)
Young People’s Literature:
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine
Dark Water by Laura McNeal
Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers
One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
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2010 National Book Award Winners Announced
The 2010 National Book Awards were announced this evening. In fiction, Jaimy Gordon won for The Lord of Misrule; in nonfiction, Patti Smith won for Just Kids; in poetry, Terrance Hayes won for Lighthead; and for young people’s literature, Kathryn Erskine won for Mockingbird.
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Looking back on the 2004 National Book Award
Some of you may recall that the 2004 National Book Award caused quite a stir in newspaper book pages as well as on lit blogs last fall. The judges were decried by some for picking five finalists whose similarities – that all five of them were women hailing from NYC – were hard to ignore, and whose lack of name recognition left many perplexed. Others applauded the judges for making a statement, whether they meant to or not, that a lot of good, award-worthy fiction is not getting the recognition it deserves.With the announcement of the Pulitzer winner on Monday, the four major American fiction prizes (the other two are the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the PEN/Faulkner) have been awarded for 2004 and it’s possible to put the controversial NBA picks in perspective. For starters, I think it’s quite interesting that not a single NBA finalist was recognized by any of the other prizes. It’s possible that there was a backlash against the NBA finalists, but it’s more likely that this year the NBA judges simply took a different course than the rest of the literary establishment.I was especially surprised to discover that Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer and NBCC Awards and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner was in fact eligible for the NBA this year, yet was not deemed worthy of even a finalist spot for that award. Now that all the votes have been tallied, it’s clear that the National Book Award judges tried to go in a different direction this year, and no one else followed.
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