Discuss the National Book Award here, including its prizes for Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature.

The finalists announced on October 11th were:

Fiction
• Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
• A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
• Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
• The Zero by Jess Walter

Nonfiction
• At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch
• Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
• Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present by Peter Hessler
• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

Poetry
• Averno by Louise Gluck
• Chromatic by H.L. Hix
• Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner
• Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey
• Capacity by James McMichael

Young People's Literature
• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
• Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt
• Sold by Patricia McCormick
• The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin
• American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

comments?

I've got to say that I was excited to see both The Worst Hard Time and Oracle Bones on the short list for nonfiction, since they are both books I have recently acquired through BookMooch. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to reading them yet, but I will be back with updates when I have.

Does anyone else have trouble "getting" Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions? I bought a copy but it is impenetrable to me. I've ordered copies of Ken Kalfus and Dana Spiotta's books as well, but haven't received them yet. I am a mystery fan and therefore predisposed to enjoy it, but I was blown away by Jess Walter's The Zero. It looks to be an instant classic and I will be amazed if any of the other contenders affect me as deeply.

I got Only Revolutions out of the library without realizing exactly how the book was set up. I took one look at it and decided I didn't have time to tackle it now. Perhaps after I read House of Leaves, which I do own, I'll have more of a desire to tackle a second Danielewski book.

I'm curious as to who has already read it and how well it was appreciated.

I couldn't be happer that Richard Powers has won the NBA for The Echo Maker, though as fine a novel as it is, it's still not his greatest book, which I think has to be The Time of Our Singing. Nevertheless, if you've never read any Powers, The Echo Maker is a terrific place to start and I highly recommend it.

And the winners, announced this morning, are:

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
M.T. Anderson
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)

POETRY
Nathaniel Mackey
Splay Anthem (New Directions)

NONFICTION
Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)

FICTION
Richard Powers
The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

LouisBranning --

I completely agree that the committee made the right choice in Powers, even if they didn't choose him in the right year. I couldn't be happier for him.

I love The Time of Our Singing but for me, his top three books are:

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
The Gold Bug Variations and
Plowing the Dark

I usually recommend Plowing the Dark as a place for Powers virgins to start. I think that the narrative is just conventional enough to satisfy people who aren't accustomed to his writing, and I find it to be an emotionally rich book.

Eat the Document, by Dana Spiotta

I found this one somewhat thin. I decided to read it, since it looked like it would go quickly, and yep, I was right. There's some interesting but not sustaining juxtaposition of the irony of the 90s being the idealism of the 70s, but it just doesn't make the book anything more than an attempt.

I had hoped that this one would not win, so I'm satisfied, lol.

I am really getting tired of the 70s Radical Goes Underground genre. In the last year, this is at least the third novel I've read.

Backwards Facing Man, I forget who wrote that one, but it was some guy who was in manufacturing forever and then quit and started to write, so that was kind of cool.

American Woman, by Susan Choi, which even though I'm vaguely interested in Patty Hearst just bored me to death.

There's always that Philip Roth one, I forget which, probably American Pastoral, but that wasn't written all *that* recently and it's Roth so you know I give it a pass.

I think Eat The Document was nominated because the committee had no other female writers nominated. There was that big fuss two years ago because it was ONLY female writers and the nominees were dominated by first novels. That seemed a little weird and the committee really came under fire.

Message edited by its author, Nov 16, 2006, 12:12pm.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus

I picked this one up next because it was the shortest of the remaining books and I thought I could power through it and maybe have more context for the award.

It's a weird one. It uses September 11, 2001, as a metaphor for the acrimonious dissolution of a marriage, both as sign and symbol, so that, for example the husband worked in the South Tower of the WTC but was late for work and so was *in* the building but got out. The wife was supposed to be on the Newark/SFO flight but her meeting got cancelled while she was on the way to the airport. So like right up front you see these two people learning that their soon-to-be-divorced spouse *likely* died, and how happy that makes them. It's a weird spin on things.

Then the kids (2 and 4) play incessant games of World Trade Center where they hold hands and jump off things in a "suicide pack."

It's so close to being amusing, but it isn't, really. Everyone's at each other's throat, and I'm finding it kind of tedious. I think it was a good thought to take the universal and make it particular, but I still think that Jonathan Safran Foer was WAY more successful at this in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

And then, it completely fell apart at the end. To the extent his irony worked at all during the bulk of the book, it failed utterly in the closing pages. Not recommended.

The Zero, by Jess Walter

Imagine the film Memento taking place in and around Ground Zero and environs in the days and months following September 11, 2001.

I'm about a hundred pages into this one and I'm liking it a *lot.* Walter clearly has his narrative in control, even though the story is about a man and a world that are out of control.

DeLillo fans should like this one, too.

I wouldn't have been mad if this one won, but that doesn't stop me from just being so happy that Powers is finally getting the recognition he has long deserved.

It just goes to show how different people's tastes are ... I find Richard Powers just about unreadable.

On a tangent, is anyone else familiar with the musician Poe? She's Danielewski's sister ... her stuff is pretty good ... the best way to describe it is a mix of those '90 grrl bands like Belly, Throwing Muses, Breeders, etc., but a bit more electronic.

With all due respect, Janey, I must disagree about Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document, which I thought one of the best books I've read this year. It's much more nuanced than it first seems, and Spiotta's radicals are real, and much more subtly realized, in ways that the characters in both Russell Banks' The Darling and Christopher Sorrentino's Trance were not, though both were excellent novels as well. And if Powers hadn't won, I would have been almost as satisfied if Spiotta had taken home the prize, as I found it just a terrific novel, one I've recommended with no hesitation this past year.

Message edited by its author, Nov 16, 2006, 8:25pm.

That's funny, LB, because it seems like you and I have similar taste in books. It's weird that we would diverge so markedly on this one.

As you felt about Eat the Document, I felt about The Zero. Have you read that one?

Hi janey, and yes, I bought a signed copy of Walter's book from Powell's just a few weeks back, and am really looking forward to it. I'd especially liked Citizen Vince, and recommended it to nearly everyone when it came out, a most entertaining novel. (And I just today posted my favorite new books of 2006 on my Profile page, Janey, including Spiotta's book of course, so you might take a look and see if there's any others you've liked.)

I just finished The Zero this morning and am already hankering to read Citizen Vince. I'm currently reading What Is The What, and liking it very much -- I'm going to be seeing a talk on December 11, with Eggers and Deng, so I'm kind of trying to read the book slowly so that it's very fresh in my mind when the talk comes around, but I'm liking what I read so far. It's hard, I think, to accurately translate onto the page the thoughts and feelings of a person from an entirely different culture, and I think Eggers is doing a good job of it. I find myself wishing that he could be more inside Deng's head rather than reporting words and actions, if you know what I mean. At about page 120, I'm finding myself looking forward to the parts that take place in the U.S., because they seem to have more emotion to them. Whether this book ends up as one of my favorites of the year remains to be seen, but I'm glad I'm reading it.

Suite Francaise pretty much blew my mind. I started shoving it at people after I read it, but I find it's a hard one to get people to read.

I have the Pessl book sitting on my shelf awaiting me. I may finish Imperial Life in the Emerald City first, though, because I just had this huge influx of fiction in my misguided attempt to read all the NBA nominees before the announcement of the winner (I came close though, lol).

Yes, I think you and I share many of the same tastes. I'll keep checking your profile (since you're stingy with reviews) to see what you're reading that I don't know about!

janey47: I liked Suite Francaise very much, and the appendices were fascinating. If you liked that one, however, you might not be so keen on the Pessl book. Good luck though.

I really loved the Pessl book, and one of my older sons called yesterday to tell me he'd just finished it and how much he liked it. And though I found the whole thing devilishly fun to read, I'll also admit to a regional bias, as I have a first-hand acquaintance with most of the deep-south geography she describes in her book, and thought she did a wonderful job of it.

I read Special Topics in Calamity Physics over the weekend, despite thinking I wanted to call it quits on fiction for a while.

I liked it a lot. For about the first 2/3 or 3/4 of the book.

No spoilers, but I thought it just fell apart at the end. I was really sorry about it, too.

However, even though I bought Citizen Vince and started it, once I finished the Pessl novel, I couldn't rest until I had re-read The Secret History, so I'm about halfway through that now and I'll probably finish Citizen Vince next.

But Special Topics *never* stopped making me think of The Secret History, and for me, the latter is the better read.

janey47:ditto

amandameale -- What I'm hoping is that Pessl pulls a reverse Tartt. Tartt had one good novel in her and that was all. I'm hoping that Pessl is just getting warmed up. *crossing fingers*

Yes. Pessl is obviously very clever - I've never read so many similes and metaphors in one book. For me the problem was in the structure. I actually liked The Little Friend but it certainly wasn't what I was expecting of Donna Tartt.

I bought The Echo Maker by Richard Powers today. Without this group I might never have heard of it.

I love Richard Powers, have read all his books, and The Echo Maker is one of his best I think, along with The Time of Our Singing and The Gold Bug Variations.

Yeah, I re-read The Gold Bug Variations a couple of weeks ago, for I think the fourth time, and then Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance, that one for the third time, I think, and I am really just still amazed at what Powers does to me.

Let's not forget Plowing the Dark, too. I think Powers writes better than almost any other living writer, and I think even his worst books are better than most writers' best books, but I think Plowing the Dark, Three Farmers, and The Gold Bug Variations are his best of the best.

But hey, I ain't gonna argue with anyone over that question, lol. I'm just happy to see people reading him!

I've started The Echo Maker, based on its winning the award and conversations on LT, but so far I'm not sure how much I'm going to like it. I'm keeping with it because it seems to be one of those books that develops slowly.

2007 WINNERS (From NBAs website)

FICTION

WINNER: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke
Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway

NONFICTION

WINNER: Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography

(sorry, some touchstones not working it seems)

Message edited by its author, Nov 17, 2007, 8:38pm.

Synopsis of the winning novel from the publisher:

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me.

This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.

I just finished Tree of Smoke and gave it a five. It is a macho book that will appeal more to men than women, I think. Uh-oh, nothing like stereotyping. To me, it's a descendant of Hemingway, Mailer etc.

My husband has recently started it. He had me call the bookstore (prior to its winning the award) to set it aside for us after he heard science fiction author Lucius Shepard rave about it.

My comment on Tree of
Smoke: 4397 Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (read 29 Dec 2007) (National Book Award fiction prize for 2007) This is the 48th such prize-winner I have read--and I admit I dislike them oftener than I like them. This one was a real chore to read. It tells of psychological operations people in Vietnam. All the characters spew out undeleted expletives and such are set out in tiresome unnecessary fullness. I could not admire anyone in the novel and since the book is 614 pages the end always seemed too far off. The book follows Skip Sands and his uncle, who are with the CIA, and the Houston brothers, who are from Phoenix , one in the Navy and the other in Vietnam. They are stupid-acting persons, though undoubtedly there are people like them in the Navy and the Army. But it is very wearisome to read about the dumb and criminal things they do. I had to laugh at the blurbs on the dust jacket on the book--"masterpiece"; "prose of amazing power and stylishness"; "pretty much impossible to stop reading"--as to each blurb the opposite is true. Only because I finish books I start--it did get a bit less pointless near the end, but not much--did I read this entire boring book.

This year's finalists have been announced. Any thoughts?

For fiction, the nominees are:

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/books/...

Message edited by its author, Oct 16, 2008, 12:09pm.

The Lazarus Project is metafiction blended with historical fiction and travelogue. The author also had a photographer collaborator with each chapter featuring a black and white photograph. I liked the book but I have my doubts that it has wide appeal.

Shadow Country is a reworking of a previously released trilogy into a single book. It is excellent.

I was curious to see if The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine would appear on this list. It did not.

I haven't read any of these (yet) (and never heard of the Scibona book), but I bought Shadow Country based on a review and am considering taking it with me on a trip (it's long).

My only thoughts are to add four books to my wishlist at BookMooch....Shadow Country was already on it.

2009 National Book Award finalists:

Fiction:
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Nonfiction:
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(Alfred A. Knopf)

Message edited by its author, Oct 14, 2009, 1:31pm.

Haven't yet read but have heard great things about Let the Great World Spin and Lark and Termite.

I have only Let the Great World Spin and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; I'll check out some of the others over the next week or so. Thanks for posting this, theaelizabet.

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor is the winner of the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction Award, chosen as the best of the winners of the annual award from 1950-2008.

The Young People's Literature Award goes to Phillip Hoose, for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

The Poetry Award goes to Keith Waldrop, for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.

The Nonfiction Award goes to T. J. Stiles, for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

O'Connor over Faulkner? I don't disagree, but I am surprised.

And, finally, the Fiction Award goes to Colum McCann, for Let the Great World Spin.

More information on all the books can be found here.

Thanks for all of the info kidzdoc.

You're welcome! I followed the award ceremony on Twitter.

I think I'll read Let the Great World Spin as soon as I finish my current novel, as rebeccanyc and others raved about it earlier this year. I have the Library of America edition of Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works, which I had already planned to read next year; this should include the titles in The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor.

I've read the O'Connor, but wouldn't at all mind rereading it. In fact, I pick out several of her stories to reread each year. She's one of my favorites. Have to get my hands on the McCann, though.

I reviewed and gave Let the great world spin a 5 star. I think it's a great book.

Both O'Connor and Faulkner were great writers but if I had to choose one it would be O'Connor but only by a hair.

I did love Let the Great World Spin, and it is certainly prize-worthy, but I haven't read any of the other finalists and so can't comment on them.

Have read In Other Rooms Other Wonders and have, thanks to cabegley, have a copy of the Colum McCann in the TBR pile (she knew I loved his Zoli). Have just finished American Salvage which was an excellent collection of short fiction set in rural Michigan - so very different that In Other Rooms which was set in Pakistan and were connected (not quite as connected as Olive Kitteridge was, but connected nonetheless).

Sometimes I wonder if it's fair to judge a collection of short fiction against a novel...