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Mon 25 Oct, 2004 11:23 am
From the Christian Science Monitor 10/14/04
National Book Award Nominees
From a record 1,074 entries, 20 titles were announced today as finalists for the National Book Awards. The winners in each of the four categories will receive $10,000 at a black-tie ceremony hosted by Garrison Keillor in New York on Nov. 17. To be eligible, a book must have been published in the United States between Dec. 1, 2003 and Nov. 30, 2004 and must have been written by a US citizen. The finalists were selected by four panels of writers appointed by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting American literature.
The Monitor will review all the finalists over the next four weeks.
Fiction
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Madeleine is Sleeping (Harcourt)
Christine Schutt, Florida (TriQuarterly)
Joan Silber, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (W.W. Norton)
Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins)
Kate Walbert, Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Scribner)
Has anyone read any of these books? Has anyone heard of any of these authors?
There was an article in the NYT (WAY too many of my sentences start with that, don't they? anyway) about just that, how obscure the books and authors were. I mean, where's "The Plot Against America" for example?
The Booker seems to have the right idea.
Anyway, haven't read any of these books (though I'm interested.)
The New Yorker pointed out that all the authors are women and all the women live in the NYC area.
The National Book Bigwigs say, "Coincidence."
Heck, I haven't even heard of any of those books, much less read them or heard of the authors.
According to The New Yorker also-rans included Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick.
According to the NYT's only one of these books has sold 2000 copies.
It appears that obscurity is the basis for nomination.
That is an incredible list of also-rans.
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