National Book Critics Circle Announces 2007 Award Winners
Autobiography: Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
Biography: Tim Jeal’s Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)
Poetry: Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy (Graywolf Press)
Nonfiction: Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)
Criticism: Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (FSG)
The ceremony also featured the presentation of the Nona Citation for Excellence in Reviewing to Sam Anderson of New York Magazine. And Emilie Buchwald, editor, writer, and founder of Milkweed Editions, was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
Awards from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Committee
Posted October 16, 2007 by Gayle
In addition to Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize and Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize for literature last week, the Dayton Literary Peace Prizes were also awarded and though you may not have even heard of these prizes, the recipients are certainly worthy of their recognition.
Elie Wiesel has won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Committee. The Nobel laureate, who has written more than 40 books, was cited for “his role as a literary and political spokesperson on behalf of Jews and other groups who have suffered persecution and death due to their religion, race, or national origin.”
Brad Kessler won the Peace Prize fiction award for Birds in Fall. Lucia Silva of Portrait of a Bookstore in Los Angeles, recommended this novel in her conversation about summer reading with Susan Stamberg on NPR’s Morning Edition. It “blossoms from inconceivable tragedy into an uncontrived mosaic of love, loss, and simple grace. And this is what Amy Bloom, author of bestseller, Away has to say about this novel:
“Birds in Fall gives us a whole world — our world — alive and full, and on the verge. Brad Kessler enters the souls of the lost, the found, and the rest of us who move from one state to the other and back. He cups all of his characters in one elegant, strong hand and pulls us through a rich and moving story with the other.”
Lisa Fugard was the fiction runner-up with Skinner’s Drift. In this beautiful, brave, and extraordinarily moving first novel, Fugard paints a haunting portrait of a young woman coming to terms with her family’s violent past as her homeland, South Africa, confronts its own bloody history.
Mark Kurlansky won the nonfiction award for Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea. Kurlansky discusses nonviolence as a distinct entity, a course of action, rather than a mere state of mind. Nonviolence can and should be a technique for overcoming social injustice and ending wars, he asserts, which is why it is the preferred method of those who speak truth to power. Nonviolence is a sweeping yet concise history that moves from ancient Hindu times to present-day conflicts raging in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The nonfiction runner-up prize was won by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin for Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. I haven’t read Kurlansky’s book but I loved Three Cups of Tea, the story of Greg’s campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti- American reaches of Asia—in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. His mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, has garnered worldwide attention and there are now more than 60 schools in this region.
Nobel Prize for Literature conversation at CHB:
Posted October 12, 2007 by Gayle
When I passed Brandon on the floor yesterday he was lamenting the fact that his favorite author, Philip Roth had one more time been passed over for the the Nobel Lit Prize. He had the same words last year when Orhan Pamuk from Turkey won the prize. Here’s our exchange:
[Gayle:] So, when do you think Philip Roth will get the nod? Lessing is 87 and I think the committee felt like she might die if they didn’t give it to her. She was a wonderful writer; I’ve been disappointed with her work the past ten years. I love that it was a woman. The Golden Notebook which I read my freshman year in college changed the way I see the world. I’ve always loved her for that.
[Brandon:] To tell you the truth, I think every year will be his year. The guy is in his 70s, and his books just keep getting better, while his contemporaries (Updike, Mailer and until recently, Bellow) seem to have forgotten how to write well. Plus there’s all of Roth’s turbulent history with the Nobel committee to consider, as well as the rancor between him and the New York writers and critics whose job it is to lobby for the winner. (They just can’t seem to get past the “tribe-outing” frankness of his books! Or his so-called misogyny. It’s like Roth said that wonderful evening in New York when Arsen from Boulder Bookstore asked him why Sabbath’s Theater, one of the great novels of the last quarter century, wasn’t as well-known as his other books: “The women didn’t like it.”) Here’s the link to Arsen’s blog.
By the way, if you haven’t read Arsen’s blog about meeting Roth at BEA, you should check it out. It’s lots of fun. The “friend from Arizona” he’s referring to is me. We had a great time that evening, chatting with our literary hero and then walking together down Central Park West to the Grove party overlooking the park. What more could a pair of book nerds like us ask for?
National Book Award Finalists
Posted Oct. 11, 2007 by Gayle
Thought some of you would be interested in the National Book Award Finalists. Changing Hands has most of these in stock and will have all of them by early next week. It’s always a surprise to see what books get nominated and ultimately win the award. I must confess to have only read a handful so far. Alas.
FICTION
Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)
NONFICTION
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)
POETRY
Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company)
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Company)
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown & Company)
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press)
Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown & Company)
MEDAL FOR DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LETTERS:
Joan Didion
LITERARIAN AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING SERVICE TO THE
AMERICAN LITERARY COMMUNITY: Terry Gross
The announcement was made (10/10/07) by author and social critic Camille Paglia at the Library Company in Philadelphia, the oldest circulating public library in America, and was covered by NPR affiliate, WHYY Radio. Each Winner receives $10,000 plus a bronze statue; each Finalist received a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award. The Winner in each of the four categories – Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People’s Literature – will be announced at the National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony in Manhattan on November 14. The dinner will be hosted by writer Fran Lebowitz.
The Finalists were selected by four distinguished panels of Judges who were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independent of and without interference by the National Book Foundation and their deliberations are strictly confidential. To be eligible for a 2007 National Book Award, a book must have been published in the United States between December 1, 2006 and November 30, 2007 and must have been written by a United States citizen.
In addition to the invitation-only gala awards ceremony, National Book Awards Week includes the following events: 5 Under 35, the Foundation’s evening of emerging fiction writers, on November 12; The National Book Awards Teen Press Conference featuring all of the Finalists in the Young People’s Literature Category on the morning of November 13 at the Donnell Public Library; and The Finalists Reading at The New School on the evening of November 13.
