Wednesday, Oct 13, 2010 1:10 PM UTC
Britain's book prize rewards Howard Jacobson's "The Finkler Question" and could teach its American cousins a lesson
By Laura Miller
The six books shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize are held at a photocall on the stage of the Royal Festival Hal in London, Sunday, Oct. 10, 2010. The winner will be announced on Tuesday, Oct. 12 at a dinner at London's Guildhall. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)(Credit: AP)
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.”
Instead, while more or less everyone can agree that tragedy is sad, humor is far more dependent on individual predisposition. The corrosive satire that some readers find hilarious strikes others as repellently misanthropic. One man’s whimsy is another’s unbearable cuteness. Physical comedy leaves some people cold, while others complain that strictly verbal wit is too dry. And when a comic novel doesn’t impress you as funny, then chances are that the whole book will seem pointless.
That said, the Booker will surely give Jacobson’s reputation a boost in this country as well as in his own. Hillary Mantel was a writer’s writer with a relatively small following of American connoisseurs before “Wolf Hall,” last year’s Booker winner and her first bestseller. As a general rule, booksellers and publishers think the Booker has a greater influence on American sales than even the National Book Award, its stateside equivalent. (The NBA shortlists will be announced today and the winners declared next month.) Despite a few blips — “Vernon God Little,” anyone? I didn’t think so — the Booker is seen as a more reliable indicator of quality. One longtime Salon reader, Toby Levy, has even made a practice of reading each year’s shortlist; you can see his rankings here.
The most important factor in the Booker’s success is the diversity of its judges. This year’s panel included a dancer, a broadcaster and an author, as well as chair Sir Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate and celebrated biographer. Although book people like to kibbitz about “typical” winners, most major awards, like the Booker, change their judges every year. (The Nobel Prize for Literature is the exception.) The line-up that picked Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger” for the 2008 Booker is entirely different from the one that selected Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty” in 2004. Nevertheless, the criteria used to select those judges has been consistent, and while even the most breathless prize-watchers seldom stop to consider such details, it’s these criteria that determine the character of each prize.
The Pulitzer Prize for fiction — the most influential of the American prizes — is, for example, awarded by the Pulitzer Board, which is mostly composed of newspaper editors and journalism professors. However, the board selects its winner from a list of three candidates chosen for it by a panel of three jurors: usually a working critic, an academic and a fellow novelist. (Full disclosure: I served as Pulitzer juror last year.) So while the final choice tends to reflect the relatively mainstream tastes of the board (which famously rejected Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” in 1974, despite strong recommendations from all three jurors), the winner is often the most accessible alternative among three candidates selected by readers with the expertise (and esotericism) of specialists.
The National Book Awards, by contrast, are chosen by panels of five judges in each category (fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature), who have “written and published works in that category.” In theory, fellow practitioners are the best judges of excellence in a given form, but this perfectly plausible reasoning suffers from a basic flaw: Writers are rarely disinterested in their evaluations of their closest peers.
Authors are competitive and often envious. Even at their most scrupulous, they tend to assume that prizes exist to help writers, not readers. Readers want judges to tell them which book is the best, but as far as most authors are concerned, attention, that precious resource, ought to be more equitably distributed. The National Book Awards’ reputation for erratic and even baffling choices, particularly in the fiction category (Susan Sontag’s “In America,” Lily Tuck’s “The News from Paraguay,” etc.), has its roots in the many clashing agendas that come into play when five novelists get together to name the year’s best novel.
There’s a lot to be said for including the civilian perspective, which is just what the Booker does by routinely bringing in nonwriters as judges — not as the only judges, but as an essential part of the mix. The book world is perpetually in danger of becoming too insular, of speaking only to itself. A literary culture in which the only people who read novels are other novelists is neither healthy nor, ultimately, sustainable. Any literary prize that wants to be valued by a wide variety of readers must, like the Booker, be willing to return the favor.
Referenced in this article:
The Man Booker Prize home page
Howard Jacobson on taking comic novels seriously
The Pulitzer Prize home page
National Book Awards home page
Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009 12:18 AM UTC
Want to win some props for your masterpiece? We can do that -- for a price
By Laura Miller
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.
On the other hand, if you’ve just self-published a book on parrot keeping or your theories on how the world could be better run (a favorite topic of retired gentlemen), what can you do? If you weren’t able to find a publisher who wanted it, you can also expect to be routinely disqualified for review in the general media and, above all, for prizes. Yet have no fear, you Cinderellas of the publishing game, because (to nab a line from someone else’s promotional campaign) there’s an app for that.
An e-mail press release for a book crossed my desk not long ago, prominently garnished with a large medallion proclaiming it a winner of “The National Best Books 2009 Awards.” For a moment, I misread that as “National Book Award,” and did a double take, which is surely what whoever came up with that name intended. Curiosity about the National Best Books 2009 Awards led me to the Web site for USA Book News, produced by an outfit called JPX Media, which claims offices in Los Angeles and New York.
USA Book News is essentially a roll of press releases, featuring reproductions of the covers of relatively new books, accompanied by their flap copy and links to author Web sites. It’s a somewhat random mix of titles, ranging from the very high profile, such as Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol,” to the solid mid-list, like a new biography of Clint Eastwood, all from established publishers. Any self-published author would be pleased to see his or her book in this respectable company, although the company itself would be oblivious to the fact. “I have never heard of this site, was not asked; nor was I informed that my book was listed there,” Shel Israel, author of “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods,” replied to my e-mail inquiry. To the extent that any mention might help an author, he’s pleased to be included, but “I have no evidence that this listing has helped me in sales.”
Why bother to set up a Web site regurgitating cover art and promo copy that anybody can find on Amazon.com? The answer, of course, lies in the National Best Books 2009 Awards, a contest that features no fewer than “150 active categories,” including three subcategories of “Animals/Pets” and 13 subcategories of business books. There’s a prize for the best children’s book on the theme of “Mind/Body/Spirit” and for the best history of media and entertainment. By all indications (JPX Media did not respond to phone calls requesting information), everyone who enters in any category winds up listed as a “finalist,” and some categories are so specific (“Mythology & Folklore”) that they have only one entry.
Best of all, as USABN’s Web site freely promises, “the National Best Books Awards are the ONLY Awards Program in the nation that offers direct coverage to the book buying public for every entry.” Like the Special Olympics, this is a competition that everybody wins. If you enter the 2010 contest by the end of this year, they’ll even throw in a “six-month full-color listing on USABookNews.com,” which is “valued at $1500.00!” despite the fact that none of the publishers whose books are listed there now seem to have paid for this service or even to be aware that it’s been provided.
Every winner and finalist — i.e., everyone who enters — can purchase gold medal-style stickers announcing the fact, which can then be slapped on the cover of the book, making it look deceptively similar to books that have won legitimate prizes like the Newbery Medal. The fee for all this is $69 (about what you’d pay to nominate your book for the National Book Awards or the Pulitzer), though you do have to pay it for each category you wish to enter; if, say, you want to send in your children’s book about Mind/Body/Spirit issues in the history of the media, you’d have to pay $138 to enter it in both categories.
That’s still not much cash to shell out for a bogus award that will impress those friends and relatives who haven’t heard of the National Book Awards in the first place and will perhaps even (briefly) deceive the few who have. Yet with 150 categories, the takings do add up. A press release for the National Best Books 2009 Awards claims “500 winners and finalists,” which comes to the nonshabby sum of $34,500 (and that’s before whatever markup they get on the stickers) — not bad for the cost of setting up a basic Web site with content that can be cut and pasted from the Web in an afternoon or two. Nowhere on USA Book News does it say who, if anyone, actually reads the books submitted to the awards; presumably, the winners could be chosen at random.
In short, the National Best Books Awards are vanity book awards, a new twist in the age-old practice of profiting off the dreams of aspiring writers. Ironically, real awards like the NBAs may not be that much better at selling books than the NBBAs. As publishing maven Michael Cader recently told the Wall Street Journal, the fiction nominees for the NBA “tend to be as a group not commercially successful, and the act of being nominated spurs modest commercial interest but tends not to drive sales in any significant quantity.”
It’s quite possible that someone who wins an NBA tonight will have earned less in royalties from his or her book than JPX Media will make by running a fake-out of the NBAs. There’s simply more money in selling services to would-be writers than there is in selling actual books to readers, since the former are rapidly coming to outnumber the latter. And that, certainly, is nothing to celebrate.
Thursday, Nov 16, 2000 9:14 AM UTC
Surprised gasps greet wins by Sontag and Philbrick.
By Laura Miller
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.
Only David Levering Lewis’ magisterial “W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963″ (Holt), the second volume of his biography of the civil rights leader, was deemed likely to give Barzun a run for his money ($10,000 to be precise, the amount claimed by each NBA winner). Also nominated were Alice Kaplan’s “The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach” (University of Chicago Press) and the evening’s least favored candidate, the controversial “Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon” (W.W. Norton) by Patrick Tierney, a book whose claim that geneticist James Neel intentionally started a deadly measles epidemic among the Yanomami Indian tribe was formally disputed by the National Academy of Science in early November, after the NBA nominations were announced.
If the judges for the nonfiction prize rejected the idea of making this year’s award a lifetime achievement honor, the fiction panel apparently took the opposite route. From a list of nominees that many in the publishing industry considered quixotic and decidedly underwhelming, Sontag was deemed the least likely to win. Charles Baxter’s “The Feast of Love” (Pantheon) was the personal favorite of several attendees, while others had pegged either Francine Prose’s “Blue Angel” (HarperCollins), an academic satire, or Joyce Carol Oates’ novelization of Marilyn Monroe’s life, “Blonde” (Ecco Press), for the prize, although “Blonde” and Alan Lightman’s “The Diagnosis” (Pantheon), an unsettling tale of a businessman beset with amnesia, were unusually idiosyncratic choices for an award that usually leans toward more straightforward literary fare.
Greeted with mixed reviews and sluggish sales, “In America” found few readers in literary circles, where the statement that Sontag’s fiction is greatly inferior to her influential criticism has become a cocktail party truism. The NBA probably won’t change that image — instead, Thursday’s watercooler conversation will no doubt attribute Sontag’s fiction prize to a desire to honor a literary icon whose struggle with cancer has intensified in recent years.
The black-tie ceremony, emceed by actor-turned-novelist Steve Martin, concluded with the presentation of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Ray Bradbury, author of “The Martian Chronicles’ and the anti-book-burning classic “Fahrenheit 451.”
Friday, Nov 19, 1999 5:00 PM UTC
Unlike 1998, no egos run amok.
By Craig Offman
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.
Friday, Nov 12, 1999 5:00 PM UTC
Oprah's Book Club introduces readers to people they already know -- themselves.
By Gavin McNett
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.
But ultimately there are those factors to think about; and in the case of the Book Club, there’s also the matter of what America thinks it’s choosing when it listens to Oprah’s advice, passes on the new Danielle Steel novel and reaches instead for the Quindlen. Home furnishings, et al., are supposed to express your tastes and reinforce your ideas of what’s good in the world. They succeed or fail according to how much pleasure you derive from them. But Oprah’s book club is supposed to improve you, to guide you toward becoming a better, wiser person.
It’s questionable that reading good books will do that in the first place, considering how writers and college professors generally turn out. But even if reading does enhance the character, most of the books that Oprah recommends are designed to have just the opposite effect: to play on base sentiment, to reaffirm popular wisdom, to tell readers what they expect to hear and to help them learn what they already know. They’re designed, like any sort of middlebrow dry-good or specialty food on the shelves at Target or Starbucks, to express their readers’ (and Oprah’s) tastes, and to reinforce what they think is right and wrong in the world.
Most of the books chosen for the Book Club come with an easy issue and a correct opinion already attached, such as the domestic violence of Quindlen’s “Black and Blue” (you’re against it), the womanliness of Chris Bohjalian’s “Midwives” (you’re for it) and the blunt racio-sexual politics of Maya Angelou, Edwidge Danticat, Breena Clarke and others (you identify with brave Little Topsy in a world of Simon Legrees). Ralph Ellison’s historic, compelling “Juneteenth” came and went, unrecommended by Oprah. But Clarke’s “River, Cross My Heart,” a poorly written, sentimental novel from a diversity bureaucrat at Time Inc., was launched into the rosters last month. You’re for it.
There have been some strong, interesting books to appear on the list over the years, including Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader,” a stark, ambiguous German novel about a man who struggles with guilt and forgiveness upon discovering that the woman he loves was a brutal concentration-camp guard during the war. Anita Shreve’s “The Pilot’s Wife” is a good, substantial piece of work, as is Jane Hamilton’s “The Book of Ruth.” But the salient qualities of these books aren’t their raw worth as literature — they are, respectively, “the Holocaust,” “women” and “women.”
And these are, of course, important subjects. But aside from “The Reader” and Ursula Hegi’s “Stones From the River,” which represent an odd trend toward sympathy for the German side of the Holocaust, it doesn’t require much greatness of soul or much hard thinking — it doesn’t, in short, entail much potential for improvement — for an audience composed almost entirely of women to identify with the travails of sympathetic feminine characters. Even Hitler, after all, was committed to the idea of justice for, and fair treatment of, people like Hitler.
And then comes the question of art. Anita Shreve is not, and will never be, Danielle Steele. And since the reading of good books is considered virtuous in itself — since it’s considered more inherently virtuous in America than, say, the decorative arts or the ceremonies surrounding the drinking of hot beverages — even people who’d gleefully hang Martha Stewart from the rafters of the last, burning Starbucks outlet are quick to defend Oprah’s Book Club on artistic grounds. It might be a bit silly on the surface, everyone seems to say, but — by God! — it’s getting America to read literary fiction. It’s made heartland superstars out of Danticat, Shreve, Hamilton. America is reading again. Reading!
To which, let’s pose a difficult question: So what? Certain publishing companies might be making pots of money from the Book Club phenomenon, and certain authors — some of whom richly deserve it — might’ve been catapulted into an incredible pitch of wealth and stardom. But the great, eldritch power of literature isn’t in books themselves, or in the base process of reading them. It’s in the spark of abiding curiosity that honest writing can kindle in you, if you’re prepared to trust it and to follow it halfway into its own premises. Literature — even bad, honest literature — changes you once you’ve experienced it well and fully. It makes you restive and always slightly hungry. It makes you feel not bigger, but incalculably smaller, because you’re forced to realize that there are entire worlds — locked up in distorted bits and fragments — in more books than you’ll ever have time to open.
But while Oprah’s club members are reading a lot of Oprah books, there’s no sign that they’re branching off to read anything else in any great profusion — no fiction, nonfiction or magazines. Apparently, all they’re curious to read is what Oprah suggests to them. “It won’t take you a long time,” Oprah assured her audience upon launching Breena Clarke’s novel. “I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it as a family drama and also as an intimate glimpse into a time and place that we don’t often hear about. It’s set around 1920 … 1925, in Georgetown in D.C. … If you are in D.C., you are really going to love it because you’ll know all the landmarks.”
Clarke’s current Amazon ranking is 35. Meanwhile, not a single, solitary person has ever ordered William W. Brown’s classic novel “Clotel, or, the President’s Daughter,” a family drama written in 1853 by a black abolitionist author — and set, like Clarke’s story, amid the landmarks of Washington. There’s a new edition due to come out any day now — and while Oprah is currently flogging a licensing deal with Starbucks, purveyors of haute-middlebrow specialty products to D.C. and the world, good money says that not 1 percent of her club members will ever hear of the publication of “Clotel,” from her or from anyone else. Brown’s book is old, unfashionable. It’s full of archaic expressions and locutions. It doesn’t address any contemporary issues. It’s hard. And unless Oprah herself decides to hoist it before the world, it won’t exist for her club in any real sense.
Still, compared to Clarke’s book, Brown’s is a masterpiece — and as someone recently said, “It won’t take you a long time.” What takes a long time is getting through the next dozen interesting books, and then the dozens after that. And once you start down that path, you quickly discover that you don’t have much time to waste on TV talk shows anymore, or any great incentive to pay attention when celebrities try to dictate your opinions about the world.
Thursday, Oct 14, 1999 4:00 PM UTC
In fiction, the trend away from big names continues.
By Laura Miller
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)
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Laurie Halse Anderson, “Speak” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Louise Erdrich, “The Birchbark House” (Hyperion Books for Children)
Kimberly Willis Holt, “When Zachary Beaver Came to Town” (Henry Holt and Company)
Polly Horvath, “The Trolls” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Walter Dean Myers, “Monster” (HarperCollins)
The list of finalists for fiction, the most closely watched and highly prized of the awards, indicates that last year’s trend away from “big” books continues. Of course, it’s a bit of a stretch to talk about trends with the National Book Awards — every year entirely new panels of five judges in each category select the winners. (This year, however, for the award’s 50th anniversary, National Book Foundation executive director Neil Baldwin chose panels made up of judges who have previously served.) This year’s fiction panel is chaired by Charles Johnson and includes Dorothy Allison, Allegra Goodman, Terry McMillan and Scott Spencer — each probably a more familiar name to the average American reader of literary fiction than any of the finalists.
Nevertheless, the usual sprinkling of well-known authors who have been either heavily promoted by their publishers or extravagantly celebrated in the press (last year’s fiction finalists included Robert Stone and Tom Wolfe) is notably missing from this year’s batch. “Definitely in the past few years the awards have been moving towards a sort of surprise selection,” confirms Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World.
And truth be told, 1999 has been a year remarkably devoid of new works of fiction published by marquee literary lions. Baldwin says that the journalists he’s talked to are focusing, for lack of a better angle, on the snubbing of Edmund Morris’ semi-fictionalized Ronald Reagan biography, “Dutch,” and Frank McCourt’s memoir “‘Tis” in the nonfiction category. Baldwin expressed exasperation at what he sees as the assumption that the NBA’s attention ought to be directed at such well-publicized bestsellers. “It’s the National Book Award,” he observed tartly, “not the National Book Reward.”
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