2012′s National Book Award winners: A guide

This year’s honorees include writers who explored real life in India’s slums, fantastical tales of goblin theatrical troupes, and more.

The 2012 National Book Awards have been announced, offering an impressively varied mix of writers at both the beginning and the end of their careers. This year, judges considered more than 1,300 books before deciding which four writers — in fiction, nonfiction, young people’s literature, and poetry — would earn a $10,000 prize (and the commensurate boost in reputation and sales). Here’s what you should know about this year’s National Book Award winners:

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Fifty Shades of Grey nominated for National Book award

EL James’s bestselling erotic novel to go up against Kate Mosse’s Citadel for popular fiction book of the year gong.

By Alison Flood

She has broken record after record, racked up sales of over 4m copies and almost single-handedly helped drag the book business out of the doldrums. And now EL James’s erotic fiction hit Fifty Shades of Grey has been nominated for a book award.

The novel, about the increasingly dark relationship between a naive young girl and a sadistic businessman, is competing for the popular fiction book of the year gong at the National Book awards, it was announced this morning. Chosen by a panel of 50 book experts, including booksellers and journalists, the prize is intended to reward an adult novel “which has made a massive impact [and] that may have exceeded expectations”.

James’s novel looks set to be the frontrunner on a shortlist that pits Fifty Shades of Grey against Kate Mosse’s novel Citadel, Victoria Hislop’s The Thread, Bernard Cornwell’s 1356, Dorothy Koomson’s The Rose Petal Beach and JoJo Moyes’s Me Before You. The winner will be chosen by votes from the 750-strong National Book awards academy, with the trophy itself to be presented by Lorraine Kelly at a ceremony on 4 December.

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National Book Award finalists announced

‘The Yellow Birds’ by Kevin Powers

By Ron Charles

Stories about the Iraq War hold a prominent place in this year’s National Book Award nominations. “The Yellow Birds,” a debut novel by Iraq vet Kevin Powers, and “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain, are among the five finalists for the fiction award. Both novels, which have received positive reviews in The Washington Post and elsewhere, are powerful tales about soldiers coming back from battle.

This year’s finalists are a star-studded group notable for their critical and popular success, although major novels from Richard Ford, Michael Chabon and Barbara Kingsolver are absent from the list.

The other three fiction finalists are “A Hologram for the King,” about an American businessman in Saudi Arabia, by Dave Eggers, who won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2009; “The Round House,” the story of an Ojibwe boy whose mother is attacked, by Louise Erdrich; and “This Is How You Lose Her,” short stories by Junot Diaz, a recent MacArthur “genius grant” winner whose previous novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

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Award-winning poet Ruth Stone dies

Ruth Stone, a poet for whom tragedy halted, then inspired, a career that started in middle age and thrived late in life as her sharp insights into love, death and nature received ever-growing acclaim, has died in the U.S. state of Vermont. She was 96.

Stone, who for decades lived in a farmhouse in Goshen, died Nov. 19 of natural causes at her home in Ripton, her daughter Phoebe Stone said Thursday. She was surrounded by her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Widowed in her 40s and little known for years after, Ruth Stone became one of the country’s most honored poets in her 80s and 90s, winning the National Book Award in 2002 for In the Next Galaxy and being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for What Love Comes To. She received numerous other citations, including a National Book Critics Circle award, two Guggenheims and a Whiting Award that enabled her to have plumbing installed in her Goshen home.

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Jesmyn Ward wins National Book Award for fiction

From left, National Book Award winners Stephen Greenblatt, nonfiction; Thanhha Lai, young people's literature; Nikky Finney, poetry; and Jesmyn Ward, fiction. (Tina Fineberg, Associated Press / November 16, 2011)

Ward’s second novel, ‘Salvage the Bones,’ about a family affected by Hurricane Katrina, is the surprise winner for fiction. Nikky Finney wins for poetry, and poet John Ashbery receives a lifetime achievement award.

By Carolyn Kellogg

Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” about a family hit by Hurricane Katrina, receives the National Book Award for fiction. The novel, her second, is a surprise winner.

On a night of literary honors, Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” about a family hit by Hurricane Katrina, received the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday at a black-tie gala in New York. Ward’s novel, her second, was a surprise winner.

The National Book Foundation, which sponsors the awards, presented two of its five major prizes to African American women. In addition to Ward, Nikky Finney won the National Book Award for poetry.

The 62nd National Book Awards were hosted by actor John Lithgow, who published a memoir in September, and included an appearance by poet Elizabeth Alexander, who read at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Poet John Ashbery, 84, was presented the foundation’s lifetime achievement award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In his acceptance speech, he noted that since he began writing, “difficult poetry” had lost traction in the literary world.

Finney’s acceptance speech for her award for the poetry collection “Head Off & Split” combined poetry with a gorgeously stated discussion of race, writing and reading. “That was the best acceptance speech for anything that I’ve ever heard in my life,” Lithgow said, after the applause finally died down. Finney lives and teaches in Lexington, Ky.

Ward, too, is from the South and considers her town of DeLisle, Miss., her inspiration.

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Q&A: National Book Award Un-Nominee, Lauren Myracle, Felt “Gutted and Ashamed”

 

 

From Harper Point Photography.

By Brett Berk

Lauren Myracle is a New York Times best-selling young-adult author. She’s also one of our country’s most frequently “challenged” writers, meaning, her books have appeared at the top of the American Library Association’s list of titles most often cited for removal—banning—from our public libraries’ shelves. In the past week, she hit another milestone: she is the first author to be nominated for the prestigious National Book Award before having that nomination revoked.

The novel in question, Shine (Abrams, 2011), concerns a violent hate crime against a small-town gay youth, the ensuing cover-up by local authorities, and a girl who takes it upon herself to find the truth. We called Myracle for her first interview since this occurred—highlights from our chat:

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An NBA Fiction Judge Responds to Laura Miller

 

Victor LaValle

By Victor LaValle

On the day the National Book Award finalists were announced, Laura Miller wrote a column at Salon.com titled “How the National Book Awards Made Themselves Irrelevant. Miller argued that the judges—and she singled out the fiction judges—“categorically rule out books a lot of people like” and that ever year “the fiction jury is locked in a frustrating impasse with the press and the public” as to what deserves award attention. One of this year’s fiction judges, novelist Victor LaValle, responds.—Ed.

I read Laura Miller’s recent lambasting of our choices with a great deal of joy. Joy mostly because I love a good fight, and because one of the things missing most from the overly polite—some might say cowardly—world of contemporary literature is a willingness to talk a little smack in defense of oneself and one’s ideals. I’ve read Ms. Miller’s criticism for years and enjoy agreeing with her almost as much as I enjoy disagreeing, but this recent column was just bonkers. I should also state, clearly, that I’m writing only for myself, not the other judges and certainly not the National Book Foundation.

There are many problems with Ms. Miller’s assessment of what’s wrong with this year’s picks but the first has to be that we, this year’s judges, have been put through some secret National Book Awards ceremony wherein we agree “that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention.” The Masonic Order of Underdogs! If such a thing ever happened then the NBA are really nefarious because they wiped my memory banks clean. I think it’s worth noting here that one of our choices, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, was an unqualified hit this year, winning its author the Orange Prize. And a second, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, was on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. How dare all those people have the gall to like books that don’t rate with Laura Miller.

Miller also suggests that the judges were intent on serving the general reading public “the literary equivalent of spinach.” In other words, our picks are meant to edify rather than, dare I even type it, entertain. But I’m at a loss at to how Ms. Miller has intuited this fact.

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10 years later, writers still trying to out-imagine 9/11 in fictionalized works

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By: Hillel Italie

Ten years later, and our imaginations are still catching up to Sept. 11, 2001.

“I don’t think art can ‘compete’ with something like 9/11,” says Jess Walter, whose post 9/11 novel “The Zero” was a National Book Award finalist in 2006. “What could be sharper than our images of that day, whether we saw it in person or witnessed it on TV? Who could make a movie as vivid as the picture we get when we close our eyes — the smoking tower, the clear sky, the second jet banking toward the other tower?”

Scores of books, films and plays have narrated and analyzed the terrorist attacks, the causes, and the emotional, cultural and political effects. The responses have evolved from the quiet grief of Anne Nelson’s play “The Guys” to such international thrillers as the film “Babel” to Joseph O’Neill’s reflective novel “Netherland.” But no fictional character or invented story has forced itself into our minds like the events themselves. No movie has matched the power, and the horror, of the snufflike footage of the plane hitting the World Trade Center’s south tower, or the iconic Associated Press photograph of a man falling from the north tower.

Sept. 11 was a new way to fear. Since the days of Puritan sermons, the American mind has summoned a wrathful god, ghosts of sins past, nuclear Armageddon, Cold War spies, lone assassins and invasions from outer space. The attacks were a different kind of nightmare: plotted from thousands of miles away; masterminded not by a head of state but by an exiled fanatic and carried out not by a professional army but by a disparate band of suicidal volunteers.

Our terrors are now global, as in Salman Rushdie’s “Shalimar the Clown,” a novel about a tightrope walker-turned-killer set everywhere from California to Kashmir. In “Syriana,” starring George Clooney and Matt Damon, parallel story lines include an energy consultant in Geneva, a CIA officer in Iran and unemployed migrant workers in Pakistan. “Babel,” with a cast featuring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, joins the fates of a goat herder in the Moroccan desert to an American woman from San Diego.

“Since 9/11, there’s been this free-floating paranoia about danger coming from anywhere, anyplace,” says performance artist Karen Finley, who is reviving “Make Love,” a riff on post 9/11 New York featuring Finley as Liza Minnelli. “It brings the mind back to that stage of childhood where you’re afraid of the dark, of the monsters under your bed.”

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National Book Award for Patti Smith

By JULIE BOSMAN

The rock musician Patti Smith won the National Book Award for nonfiction on Wednesday night for “Just Kids,” a sweetly evocative memoir of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and life in the bohemian New York of the 1960s and ’70s.

Accepting the award to applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up as she recalled her days as a clerk in the Scribner’s bookstore in Manhattan.

“I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

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