Salon.com > National Book Awards

Who should judge book awards?

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:20:00 +0000

When I finished graduate school, I had a masters of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book -- and almost no marketable skills. Luckily, I landed a full-time job as a bookseller at a large Barnes & Noble in New York. The pay wasn’t much above minimum wage but they did offer health insurance. They even let me request the section I wanted to work in and I chose Fiction. I was 25 and had spent the last seven years immersed in Literature. Who better than me to serve the fiction-reading public?

Unfortunately, I sucked at the job.

There were three reasons for this. First: I was lazy.

The Fiction section of the Barnes & Noble at Union Square is on the enormous fourth floor of a four-story building. Fiction and poetry take up only about a quarter of it. There’s even a large-scale reading venue reserved for big names. Patricia Cornwell, author of the super-popular Kay Scarpetta crime novels, read in that space while I worked there. The fourth floor seems as big as an arena.

The National Book Award nominee that wasn’t

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:45:00 +0000

Lauren Myracle is accustomed to seeing her name on lists. The young-adult author, who frequently deals in the complicated, dark, profane, and sexually charged vicissitudes of youth, can be found frequently on the New York Times bestseller list -- and the American Library Association's collection of the most frequently challenged authors. Her work is included on Anita Silvey's "500 Great Books for Teens." She's made Booklist's roster of Top Youth Romances, and the ALA's list of Best Books for Young Adults.

So when her gritty novel "Shine" was listed as one of five National Book Award finalists last week, it seemed a crowning recognition for an acclaimed novelist. Later that day, Myracle tweeted her elation, saying, "I'm a lucky girl for SO many reasons…. I'm grinning BIG time!"

And then it all hit the fan.

Patti Smith wins National Book Award for nonfiction

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:33:00 +0000

The winners seemed stumped at the National Book Awards.

There were few prepared speeches on Wednesday night as most recipients managed few words beyond thanking the usual suspects. Patti Smith, who has some experience before audiences, became tearful as she accepted the nonfiction prize for "Just Kids," a bittersweet look back to New York City in the 1960s, when anything really could happen and Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe were just a couple of young artists out to break the rules. (Read Laura Miller's review of "Just Kids" here.)

Smith became the rare rock star to win a competitive literary award (Bob Dylan has win an honorary Pulitzer) and the one-time punk rocker offered an old-fashioned tribute to books. She begged publishers not to let the printed page die in the electronic age and recalled working decades ago at a Scribner's bookstore, stacking the National Book Award winners and wondering how it would feel to win one.

"So thank you for letting me find out," said Smith, 63, who now claims an award previously given to Rachel Carson, Gore Vidal and Joan Didion.

Why do the National Book Awards bar fairy tales?

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:20:00 +0000

Juries for the National Book Awards (which will be presented later this week) are famous for coming up with nominees that defy expectation and prediction, but there are nevertheless a few things you can be sure you won't see on the NBA short lists. Books that aren't published in the U.S. or translations from other languages, for example, are disqualified, as are "anthologies containing work written by multiple authors." Those restrictions make sense, but what about this stipulation, from the official rules posted on the NBA website: "Collections and/or retellings of folk-tales, myths, and fairy-tales are not eligible"?

Two authors recently wrote to the National Book Foundation, asking the organization to reconsider its exclusion of retold fairy and folk tales from NBA consideration. (The rule applies to both the "fiction" and the "young people's literature" categories.) Maria Tatar is a professor of folklore, mythology and Germanic languages and literature at Harvard, and Kate Bernheimer is the founder and editor of the Fairy Tale Review, a literary journal, and editor of a sumptuous new book of short stories based on fairy tales, "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me." Contributors to that anthology -- which wouldn't be eligible to begin with, on account of containing "work written by multiple authors" -- include Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman and Michael Cunningham, and as the title suggests, we're talking about the unexpurgated, frequently gruesome, old-school-style fairy tales, not the sanitized Disney versions.

Franzen snubbed by National Book Awards

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:12:16 +0000

It's the Great American Snub.

Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom," the year's most highly praised and talked about literary novel, was not among the fiction finalists announced Wednesday for the National Book Awards.

Nine years ago, Franzen won for "The Corrections" and his latest book was a sensation even before its release, the subject of a Time magazine cover story and rave reviews and so in demand that President Obama obtained an early copy. Oprah Winfrey picked "Freedom" for her book club, even though Franzen's ambivalence in 2001 over her choosing "The Corrections" had led her to cancel his appearance on her show.

Nominees on Wednesday included Peter Carey, whose "Parrot and Olivier in America" was a runner-up for the Man Booker Prize, and such well-regarded authors as Nicole Krauss ("Great House") and Lionel Shriver ("So Much for That"). The book awards also welcomed a rock star, Patti Smith, a nonfiction contender for "Just Kids," a memoir about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; and an attorney, poetry finalist Monica Youn ("Ignatz"), whose day job is with the Brennan Center for Justice in New York.

Why the Booker is the best literary award

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:10:00 +0000

By the time Howard Jacobson's "The Finkler Question" won the Man Booker Prize in London last night, the bookmakers who famously place odds on the outcome had closed down betting on the favorite, Tom McCarthy's "C," due to a "suspicious" last-minute rush.

That's the Booker in a nutshell, a British prize that generates tabloidish buzz in the U.K. (they even broadcast the ceremony on TV) and commands a surprising amount of sales clout on this side of the pond. "C" has divided critics and readers; McCarthy is a one-man campaign for the revival of the nouveau roman, the strain of European experimental fiction pioneered by such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Alain Robbe-Grillet. People either love that idea, or really, really hate it, and despite all those dicey-looking, 11th-hour bets, it seems there just weren't enough lovers of high modernism on this year's jury.

"The Finkler Question," on the other hand, ruminates on the nature of British Judaism. Its author, despite having two previous novels on the Booker long list, has complained in the press that comic novels like his aren't taken seriously enough. He's got a point, but as someone who couldn't make it through "The Finkler Question," I'd suggest that this isn't necessarily due to what Jacobson has termed "a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness."

Vanity book awards

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:18:00 +0000

The National Book Foundation will present its annual National Book Awards in downtown Manhattan Wednesday night, at a gala event in the glittering, Greek-revival setting of Cipriani Wall Street. The ceremony's organizers labor mightily to bring glamour to a notoriously dowdy industry, and no doubt the evening will be thrilling for both nominees and winners.

Literary awards are more than just ego boosts these days. As the critic James Wood observed a few years back, "prizes are the new reviews," the means by which many people now decide which books to buy, when they bother to buy books at all. There are some 400,000 titles published per year in the U.S. alone -- one new book every minute and a half -- according to Bowker, a company providing information services to the industry, and there are fewer people with the time and inclination to read them. If you only read, for example, about five novels per year (a near-heroic feat of literacy for the average American), you could limit yourself to just the winners of the NBA, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle, the Booker Prize and then, oh, a Hugo or Edgar winner -- or even a backlist title by that year's Nobel Prize winner. You'd never have to lower your sights to anything unlaureled by a major award.

National Book Award winners announced

Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:14:00 +0000

Audible gasps greeted the announcements of the winners of the two most avidly watched categories at the 2000 National Book Awards Wednesday night at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, Nathaniel Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea" for nonfiction and Susan Sontag's "In America" for fiction.

The winners are:

Fiction: "In America" by Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nonfiction: "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking Penguin)

Poetry: "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000" by Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions)

Young people's literature: "Homeless Bird" by Gloria Whelan (HarperCollins)

Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea" beat widespread favorite Jacques Barzun's bestselling "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present" (HarperCollins). Before the ceremony, several seasoned NBA-watchers expressed confidence that French-born, 93-year-old Barzun would win the award as the cap to a long career as an eminent historian with a sizable popular readership.

Gaffes, but no fireworks, at National Book Awards

Fri, 19 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Accepting a special gold medal at the 50th anniversary of the National Book Awards Wednesday night, Oprah Winfrey described calling up novelist Wally Lamb and marveling to learn that some authors actually wash their own clothes. This year's awards ceremony, held in the ballroom of New York's Marriott Marquis, certainly drives the point home; there wasn't a stitch of dirty laundry to be found.

While not outright controversial, last year's National Book Awards benefited from a few gossipy ripples. John Updike, who was the 1999 gold medal winner, had recently written a less-than-glowing review of one of the fiction nominees, Tom Wolfe, and until it became clear that Wolfe wasn't going to show for the ceremony (perhaps guessing, correctly, that he wouldn't win), attendees were murmuring about the potential of a chilly meeting of the two literary lions. Wolfe's decision to opt out proved prudent. Alice McDermott's "Charming Billy" took the fiction prize last year in an upset, beating out Wolfe's "A Man in Full" and "Damascus Gate" -- the work of another marquee author, Robert Stone, who was considered Wolfe's most serious challenger.

This year there was nary a feud nor an overweening ego on the horizon, and the slate of dark horse fiction nominees eliminated the likelihood of any major surprise at the announcement of the winner (Ha Jin's "Waiting"). In fact, it was the hired help who caused the trouble: Emcee (and "Pure Drivel" author) Steve Martin got off a few decent wisecracks ("You didn't expect to win, yet you wrote a speech. It doesn't add up," he observed to children's literature winner Kimberly Willis Holt as she left the stage), but he also mispronounced the name of publishing house St. Martin's.

Most egregiously, Martin (or whoever supplied him with the nominee list) forgot to announce novelist Patricia Henley (author of "Hummingbird House") among the fiction nominees, and the chairman of the fiction panel, Charles Johnson, neglected to correct the error when he took the podium. This was the first-ever NBA nomination for Henley's publisher, MacMurray & Beck, which must have made the omission all the more disappointing for the small Denver house.

In addition to accuracy, sportsmanship was also in short supply. Holt was the only winner to acknowledge the other nominees in her category, a gesture that's something of an NBA tradition. Could this be the legacy of last year's nonfiction winner, the remarkably unpopular Edward Ball? When Ball took the podium last November, his announcement that he intended to donate a quarter of the proceeds of his book, "Slaves in the Family," to charity only seemed to intensify the widely held sentiment in publishing circles that Ball is insufferably self-congratulatory. Some observers even claimed to have seen the staff of Ball's former publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, visibly cringe as the author made his speech.

Before announcing that historian John W. Dower had won the nonfiction prize for "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II," panel chairman Neal Gabler treated an unappreciative audience to a jeremiad about the state of publishing. He denounced publishers for publishing books "that made for good marketing" rather than "marketing good books," cautioning that "we have to protect publishing from ourselves" before concluding that he had "come not to bury publishing, but to praise it."

Martin had kicked off the gathering by offering an informed comparison for those similarly disenchanted with the industry: "There's a big difference between the National Book Awards and the Academy Awards," he said. "At the Academy Awards you can feel the greed and envy and ego. Whereas the National Book Awards," he added, pausing for ironic effect, "are in New York."'

However, at this relatively sedate anniversary gala, the closest thing to an expression of envy came from Dorothy Allison's fellow fiction judges, who evinced an awed marvel at her stamina as a reader. Panel chairman Johnson said Allison had read some of the entries five or six times, and other judges seconded his statement with slightly stunned nods. Allison herself didn't attend the ceremony. No doubt she was enjoying a well-earned rest.

Reaching to the converted

Fri, 12 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

One thing you have to grant Starbucks: A lot of Americans are now drinking decent coffee, whereas not long ago, the best you could count on finding throughout most of the country was 40-weight diner mud. You also have to say something of that nature for Oprah's Book Club, for the Martha Stewart empire and for Target, Wal-Mart and the rest of our neutron-bomb superstores.

Owing to their efforts, it's now possible to make a random parachute jump into almost any part of the country with a scavenger-hunt list of diverse, formerly haute-middlebrow items -- such as faux-Victorian wall-trim appliquis, severe-looking desk lamps, walnut veneer picture frames, palazzo pants, extra virgin olive oil, dried serrano chiles and Anna Quindlen novels -- and to be reasonably sure of greeting the rescue plane at the end of the day with a full load of swag. The level of our mass taste -- the Public Brow -- has been surging upward over the past several years, and it's hard not to see that as some kind of victory for American culture, and for our domestic grace-and-dignity index, no matter what commercial forces might be mustered behind it, or how compromised and tricked-up much of the stuff may actually be.

National Book Award finalists: Year of the dark horses

Thu, 14 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The 1999 National Book Award finalists were announced Wednesday:

FICTION

Andre Dubus III, "House of Sand and Fog" (W.W. Norton & Company)

Kent Haruf, "Plainsong" (Alfred A. Knopf)

Patricia Henley, "Hummingbird House" (MacMurray & Beck)

Ha Jin, "Waiting" (Pantheon Books)

Jean Thompson, "Who Do You Love" (Harcourt Brace & Company)

NONFICTION

Natalie Angier, "Woman: An Intimate Geography" (A Peter Davison Book / Houghton Mifflin Company)

Mark Bowden, "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War" (Atlantic Monthly Press)

John W. Dower, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II" (W.W. Norton & Company/The New Press)

John Phillip Santos, "Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation" (Viking)

Judith Thurman, "Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette" (Alfred A. Knopf)

POETRY

Ai, "Vice: New & Selected Poems" (W.W. Norton & Company)

Louise Gl|ck, "Vita Nova" (The Ecco Press)

Clarence Major, "Configurations: New & Selected Poems 1958-1998" (Copper Canyon Press)

Sherod Santos, "The Pilot Star Elegies" (W.W. Norton & Company)

C.K. Williams, "Repair" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)