If there is an award season for the book industry, it’s probably right around now. The Booker will be announced in a couple of days, the Nobel Prize was just announced, and now the finalists for the National Book Award have been announced. (The Pulitzer doesn’t happen until the spring, though.) The big news this year is that the 9/11 Commission Report has been nominated in the non-fiction category. It’s an unprecedented development, and I can’t help but think that a message is being sent. And it is a rather clever way of getting publicity for the award. It also, however, reflects the important place in history that 9/11 will hold. On the fiction side, the nominees are an interesting bunch, all of the women and none of them big, well-known names. Below you can find the nominees for the fiction and non-fiction categories, and some excerpts or whatever else I could find.
Fiction
- Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum — profile
- Florida by Christine Schutt — interview
- Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber — excerpt
- The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck — excerpt
- Our Kind: A Novel in Stories by Kate Walbert — excerpt
Non-Fiction
- Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle — review
- Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer — excerpt
- Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett by Jennifer Gonnerman — excerpt (this is a good one)
- Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt — excerpt
- 9/11 Commission Report — read it here
