Thursday, November 15, 2007

And the Winners Are...

The winners of the National Book Awards were announced last night in a ceremony in New York. Though there has already been much written about the event, it seemed to me that Sarah Weinman boiled it down most touchingly:
Like this year and last, I had a good time at the Book Awards. Why? Because even though the dress-up quotient was high and the speeches were long, I always feel a palpable love of literature in the room, even if it's not necessarily correlated to the nominated books.
Meanwhile, Edward Champion did a blow-by-blow throughout the evening.

The winners are as follows:

Fiction:
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Also nominated:
Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown & Company)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf)

Non-Fiction:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)
Also nominated:
Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Alfred A. Knopf)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad (Alfred A. Knopf)
Poetry:
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Also nominated:
Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson (Houghton Mifflin Company)
The House on Boulevard St., by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly (W.W. Norton & Company)
Messenger, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton & Company)
Young People’s Literature:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown & Company)
Also nominated:
Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Touching Snow
, by M. Sindy Felin (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press)
Story of a Girl
, by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown & Company)

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