National Book Award Finalists Announced
The National Book Award Finalists have been announced! I’m only going to post the finalists for fiction and poetry. This is coming from the Critical Mass blog, which is the blog of the Book Critics Circle.
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)
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)
The first comment on the Critical Mass post for the National Book Award posting makes the point that all the finalists are mostly unknown authors and probably won’t be remembered in two years. While future success is always hard to predict, the person who commented does make a good point. There are many better known authors who published great books over the last year. Why not pick one of them?
However, a rebuttal to that argument would be that the National Book Award is not a popularity contest. The highest selling, or most well known author doesn’t win. I don’t know the exact criteria the judges follow when making their selections, but I doubt popularity has anything to do with it.
I’ll let you decide if you think the above authors and poets are deserving. Buy some of their books (I plan to) and tell us what you think.
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- Bad writing contest: an award no writer wants
- Who should decide literary awards: ‘Experts’ or the reading public?
- 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced!
- Booker Prize winner announced
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