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SAN FRANCISCO, CA, DECEMBER 2, 1996 | SALON, the critically acclaimed Web site of books, arts and ideas, announced its first annual Book Awards today. The awards, which pay tribute to the authors and publishers of ten outstanding books published in the United States in 1996, are co-sponsored by Borders Books & Music.

"All literary awards are impossibly subjective," said Salon Book Review Editor Dwight Garner, who oversaw the selections with SALON Senior Editor Laura Miller. "But having said that, our criteria were actually very simple. These are the ten books published in 1996 that grabbed hold of our imaginations and wouldn't let go. They're the books we greedily and childishly fell in love with, that we couldn't wait to tell our friends about, that we wanted to sleep with under our pillows. Are they necessarily the year's most 'important' books? Who knows. But one thing is certain: These are the books that, as soon as we read the last page, we immediately wanted to turn back to page one and start all over again."

The winners of the 1996 SALON Book Awards are:

Fiction:

• "The Family Markowitz" by Allegra Goodman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• "Reader's Block" by David Markson (Dalkey Archive)
• "The Giant's House" by Elizabeth McCracken (The Dial Press)
• "The Moor's Last Sigh" by Salman Rushdie (Pantheon)
• "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown)

Nonfiction:

• "My Dark Places" by James Ellroy (Knopf)
• "The Shadow Man" by Mary Gordon (Random House)
• "The Temple Bombing" by Melissa Fay Greene (Addison-Wesley)
• "The Living and the Dead" by Paul Hendrickson (Knopf)
• "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt (Scribner)

U.S. News & World Report has called SALON the best Web site of the year, "a smart, elegant Web-based magazine that appeals to the digital intelligentsia and neophytes alike." SALON is now featured in Netscape's Destinations and Inbox Direct programs and is an America Online "Members Choice" selection.

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For more information contact
Dayna Macy, Director of Public Relations
macy@salonmagazine.com or 415-537-9345

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