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.

Salon.com > Victor LaValle

Who should judge book awards?