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.
2010 National Book Award Winners Announced
A Malpractitioner By Any Other Name?
What can we make of the fact that members of the Guantánamo Bay medical staff have adopted Shakespearean names in “an attempt to avoid being held liable for any mistreatment of detainees?” Globe Theatre artistic director Dominic Dromgoole and Guantánamo detainees lawyer Clive Stafford Smith ponder the question.
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Un Bon Dia
To begin to translate a book, you need to hone your knowledge of the language in which it’s written. To write a great essay about translating a book, you need a backstory, an interesting format and two or three foreign parables. At The Rumpus, Brian Oliu writes about translating his grandfather’s book from the Catalan.
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“The flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one”
If you’ve ever had a successful friend you secretly envied and maybe even hated, you may be in startlingly good company: a new reading of an old letter between Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot indicates that the “flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one” shared exactly this kind of frenemyship. Unrelated: a short recording of Eliot reading “The Naming of Cats.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Grossman, Baker, Dyer, Pierre, Wilson, Mukherjee, Grossman
In a big week for new releases, we have Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his blockbuster debut The Magicians; Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, reviewed here today; another new Geoff Dyer book, The Missing of the Somme; DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland; and Kevin Wilson’s debut novel The Family Fang (which one blurber calls The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Four of the five books above, incidentally, were featured in our big second-half preview. And out in a paperback this week are a pair of award winners: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land.
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Bradbury’s Legacy
As Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday approaches, Slate explores why his stories have seeped into the culture.
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Your Country Rocks
Few people know that Roger Ebert was an ardent Anglophile, so much so that in 1986 he wrote an obscure little book, The Perfect London Walk, in which the lifelong film critic laid out his preferred walking path through the city. Over at Slate, Katie Engelhart reviews the book, which apparently still functions as a guide to a decent stroll.
Poetry in a Box
Recommended Reading: On poetry about poem-making and the poetics of assemblage.
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Well, The Millions has discussed this before, so now that “Lord of Misrule” has won the National Book Award for fiction, NOW what does the publishing house do in terms of a second printing?
On October 13th, bestselling author Pat Conroy announced the finalists for this year’s National Book Award at the Historic Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia.
2010 National Book Award Winners books :
CULTURES OF WAR: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq by John W. Dower
DARK WATER by Laura McNeal
EVERY MAN IN THIS VILLAGE IS A LIAR: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack
GREAT HOUSE by Nicole Krauss
I HOTEL by Karen Tei Yamashita
JUST KIDS by Patti Smith
LOCK DOWN by Walter Dean Myers
LORD OF MISRULE by Jamie Gordon
MOCKINGBIRD by Kathryn Erskine
NOTHING TO ENVY: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
ONE CRAZY SUMMER by Rita Williams-Garcia
PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA by Peter Carey
SECRET HISTORIAN: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward by Justin Spring
SHIP BREAKER by Paolo Bacigalupi
SO MUCH FOR THAT by Lionel Shriver