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
Never Comfortable
Recommended Viewing: On the improbable triumph of a young black lesbian poet and the efficacy of mentorship.
Everything is Political
Recommended Reading: Amy King, Shane McCrae, Ken Chen, and fifteen other poets and activists on political poetry and literary activism.
New Zadie Smith
Recommended Reading: Zadie Smith’s latest short story, “Moonlit Landscape with Bridge,” at The New Yorker. “The Minister got stuck on a sentence: I am further from my village now than I have ever been. Italicized just like that, in his mind.”
László Krasznahorkai Wins the Man Booker International Prize
The Man Booker International prize was just awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, author of Satantango (later adapted for film by Béla Tarr) and Seiobo There Below. When asked to recommend a starting point for readers who have yet to encounter his work, the author defers: “I couldn’t recommend anything … instead, I’d advise them to go out, sit down somewhere, perhaps by the side of a brook, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, just remaining in silence like stones. They will eventually meet someone who has already read my books.” Well, if a stream isn’t handy, we have a few ideas: our own interview with Krasznahorkai, Stephanie Newman’s review of Seiobo There Below, and Music and Literature’s issue no. 2, featuring literature on and by Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr.
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You/Are Entering
Apparently the confessional poets hated being known as confessional poets. Writers like John Berryman and W.D. Snodgrass responded badly when given the label. How do we understand their shared revulsion to the term? At The Paris Review Daily, an argument that we can find the answer in an unlikely place: The Twilight Zone.
A Memory, Deconstructed
In Johns Hopkins Magazine, a remembrance of the Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man Symposium, which brought together Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, among others. About Derrida, Professor Richard Macksey (whose library you may have seen) recalls: “I’m not sure we were clear about where this guy was going.”
A Crook By Any Other Name
William Shakespeare: playwright, poet, and…potential tax evader. Turns out the Bard might not have been the nicest businessman.
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