Book Awards

 
(The crowd lining up to get into the National Book Awards, the amazing Cipriani ceiling inside)

The National Book Awards for first-time attendees like my wife Ann and me constituted a kind of blur of sharp-dressed men and women, most of them graying a bit but still elegant, mixed with a few twenty-somethings running around on the fringes like the kids at a bar mitzvah. The location, with its high ceilings and spectacular dome, perfectly lit, conveyed a sense more of publishing’s memory palace than of its harsh reality right now. At the same time, you could hardly blame editors and writers, publishers and agents, for wanting to engage in a high-end collective sigh of relief that, despite many grim indicators, the whole thing hasn’t yet gone bust.

You can follow Jeff's account of the National Book Awards gala from press row in his running comments to his post earlier tonight, but here's a quick wrapup of the winners, which include, we're thrilled to say, our own choice for the Best Book of 2009, Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann's tender ensemble novel of New York City at the moment of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. The #nba09 Twitter thread was very long, and the news reports of the awards are rather short so far tonight, but Jeff will be back in the daylight hours with a lengthier first-hand account of the evening.

The winners:

• Fiction: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• Nonfiction: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
• Poetry: Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop
• Young People's Literature: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

Quick links...
Phillip Hoose wins the National Book Award in the young readers category for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Shona, a blogger, starts the Rory Gilmore Books Project, in which she sets out to read 260 books mentioned, shown, or joked about on the Gilmore Girls. (via Book-a-rama.)

Variety calls New Moon, the movie, "as good as Twilight and arguably a shade better."

The Daily Beast compiles a photo gallery of the Best Twilight Tattoos. (via GalleyCat.)

Tired of vampires yet? You're not the only one. Stephenie Meyer tells Oprah.com: "I'm a little burned out on vampires right now."

Happy reading!--Heidi

This evening I'll be reporting back from the National Book Awards here in New York City, technology permitting. Check back at this blog entry from about 9pm EST on, and I'll be posting results to the comments section as an easy low-tech way to get you the information. In the meantime, I'll try to comment on the preamble to the awards as time allows.

To refresh your memory, here are the nominees.

Fiction:

• American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
• Far North by Marcel Theroux

Nonfiction:

• Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook by David M. Carroll
• Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
• The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor
• The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles

Poetry:

• Versed by Rae Armantrout
• Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach
• Speak Low by Carl Phillips
• Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
• Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop

Young People's Literature:

• Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
• Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
• Stitches by David Small
• Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor
• Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia

M.G. gets a G.G.: At the venerable Governor General's Awards in Canada, ex-pat Kate Pullinger slipped past bigger names like Alice Munro, Michael Crummey, and Annabel Lyon at the post to win the fiction prize for The Mistress of Nothing, while two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji won the nonfiction award for A Place Within: Rediscovering India. [Globe & Mail coverage]

The Ryan Leaf effect: On his blog, Malcolm Gladwell responds to Steven Pinker's NYTBR cover critique of What the Dog Saw (as linked in Old Media Monday this week). Scroll down into the comments section for an sometimes substantial debate about, among other things, "igon values" and how to measure whether NFL quarterbacks' draft positions correlate with their career success.

No recession for political book authors: Although no one but the president himself has yet written a big bestseller about Barack Obama, the NY Observer reports that Jodi Kantor has turned her recent NYT Magazine profile of the Obamas' marriage into a "stunning seven-figure book deal" with Little, Brown. Meanwhile, in other seven-figure political book news, Karl Rove's first book now has a title and pub date: Courage and Consequence, coming on March 9.

Moving & shaking: Sarah Palin's not the only bestselling author on Oprah this week. Jenna Jameson's appearance yesterday sent her 2004 memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star (finally coming out in paperback in January) back into our top 100 and to the top of our Movers & Shakers list this morning.

--Tom

The Giller goes to...: An upset winner for Canada's biggest book prize last night: veteran TV journalist Linden MacIntyre overtook more favored novels by Anne Michaels and Annabel Lyon, among others, with his Giller Prize win for The Bishop's Man, a story of corruption in the Catholic Church in Nova Scotia. It only came in fourth out of five in the Guess the Giller contest, and the Globe & Mail's pre-award prediction panel settled on Michaels (although they liked The Bishop's Man). No US publication rights yet, though that should change soon.

"At's a lot a preparation": James Jones's daughter Kaylie (author of Lies My Mother Never Told Me) reveals the cuts to homosexual storylines that Jones made to From Here to Eternity in response to publisher pressure.

The Bassmetrics revolution: The Millions points to the spreadsheet compiled by the obsessive Best American Short Stories blogger at Years of BASS, which tracks the most frequent author appearances in the yearly anthology since 1978: Alice Munro leads by a mile, followed by Updike, Oates, and Mavis Gallant (those Canadians again--should it be renamed Best North American Short Stories?). But just measuring author appearances? As a former baseball stats geek, I know we can dig much further into the data: the journals the stories came from, trends in literary symbols and alcohol and drug intake, frequency of adultery, brand names, and talking animals... C'mon, amateur scholars, there's hectares of open territory here.

Moving & shaking: On Veteran's Day, Robert M. Poole's On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery appears in our top 10 Movers & Shakers.

In late September, the Canadian contingent of the Amazon Books team traveled (or travelled, as they say north of the border) to Toronto to help celebrate the five fantastic finalists of the 33rd Annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and to honor(/honour) the winner.

Let me pause here to acknowledge that you may be wondering how it could have been the 33rd Annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award. There isn't room in this post to explain (gotta keep it tight), so I'll just say it's an award with an illustrious history and impressive previous winners (like Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, and--most recently--the amazing Gil Adamson), and we feel very honoured to have been involved since we first opened our virtual Canadian bookstore. You can find out more here--and keep an eye out for the 34th Annual FNA winner, who will be announced in April of 2010.

I wasn't a judge for this award, but I was thrilled when I heard their unanimously enthusiastic verdict: Joan Thomas for Reading by Lightning, which has the markings of a real classic (and not just a classic of CanLit). I felt real affection for her vibrant heroine, Lily Piper, born on the dust-covered Prairie in the first quarter of the 20th century to a devout family who thought she might be flirting with the Devil. Her sudden departure/escape for England as a young woman, the onset of World War II, her mad love for her kooky, hot, brilliant adopted (adopted, so it's not weird!) cousin George, her bouts of wild grief, and the strange dynamic with her mom that only gets stranger--it all feels true to the time and Lil's character, but contemporary and totally absorbing. Plus, Thomas's writing is often crystaline.

I notice the novel's official description calls it a bildungsroman, which seems like a pretentious word for such an everygirl story--but come to think of it, Lily isn't really an everygirl. She's imaginative and amazing, and she had a fascinating life. Though I finished this book almost 3 months ago, I can pull myself back to the final scene at will, and though I don't remember the exact line, the memory still does something warm and interesting in my chest. (I'm a very sensory reader--I have to feel a book somewhere in my torso to really like it.)

At this point, you might like to get one for yourself from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com Books, or for your Kindle. Excellent idea. But first, read on--because I have this special bonus Q&A!

Amazon.com/.ca: Lily Piper is one of the most fully alive heroines I've ever encountered. Was she your own invention, or were you inspired by someone?

Joan Thomas: I had the spine of a true story to start with. When my aunt was 16, her father took her out of school and sent her to England to look after his mother. All on her own, she took the train two thousand miles to Montreal and boarded a ship, and went to live with people she had never met. I was amazed when I heard about this.

Yet my aunt never talked about her excellent England adventure. None of my older relatives talk much about the past—they’re actually a little suspicious of people who dramatize their experiences or dwell on their feelings! So I had to make sense of this story with my imagination. I sent Lily to a different part of England than my aunt had visited, and I invented her experiences there. Lily is the result of my desire to create a character I could understand and relate to, one who experienced adolescence with the intensity that I experienced it. I think of her as a contemporary character living in the past. As a first-time novelist, I had no idea whether I could pull this off, but by the end Lily was so real to me that the final chapter pretty much wrote itself.

Amazon.com/.ca: The story of the Isaac Barr's ill-fated Canadian prairie colony is a fascinating historical component of the story. Did your family have a personal connection, or was this just a story that captured your imagination?

Joan Thomas: I never knew my grandfather, but I was told growing up that he had come from England with the Barr Colonists, so I read what I could find about that movement. I went to the archives and poured over the passenger lists, where the names of everyone arriving in Canada by ship in any year are written in ink in someone’s crabbed handwriting. I never found my grandfather’s name. But by then I was hooked by the story of the Barr Colonists, the megalomaniac Isaac Barr and the naïve immigrants who were so sure their English superiority would carry them through.

Amazon.com/.ca: There's irony in how the aspiring paleontologist George "tried, finally, to evolve, to fit into a different world, but couldn't do it fast enough," while Lily, raised in an evangelical Christian community with a mother who's powerfully fearful of change (especially changes in Lily's body), undergoes dramatic personal transformation before she finally feels at home in her world. Your next novel, Curiosity, due out next spring, also has evolution at its center: an intact skeletal fossil of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, the first discovery of its kind, is unearthed by a 12-year-old cabinet-maker's daughter, who goes on to become a paleontologist well before Darwin publishes The Origin of Species.

What makes the scientific story of evolution such a potent metaphor for exploring the lives of your characters, as well as the evolving relationship between science and our concept of ourselves?

Joan Thomas: I never studied science but I’m intrigued by fossils, those millions-year-old bits of the past. My decision to send George to Dorset for field school turned out to be a fateful one (for me—if not for George!). It was while I was researching the Dorset coast for Reading by Lightning that I discovered Mary Anning, the amazing young woman you mention, who found huge fossil remains at Lyme Regis back when no one had any sense of what these creatures were. I've since made three research trips to Lyme Regis, and have had a fantastic time walking that coast and writing a novel about Mary Anning and her sidekick, the geologist Henry de la Beche.

So evolution (in a literal sense) is more at the centre of Curiosity than it is of Reading by Lightning. When Mary Anning found the first ichthyosaurus in 1811, the townspeople thought she’d dug up a dragon, and the scientists coming down from Oxford thought it was the bones of a creature drowned in Noah’s flood. Mary Anning’s fossil finds were a huge challenge to their beliefs about nature and humanity’s place in it. Ideas of extinction and an old earth, concepts so important to evolution, were in the air.

Evolution is on my mind at the moment because of the crisis we face on the planet. Whether we can transform fast enough to avoid full blown ecological disaster—I see this as the major question of our age. As a novelist you approach such big ideas with caution. You’re writing stories, not political discourse. With Curiosity, I was really happy to have stumbled upon a story that, although it’s set in the early 19th century, raises ideas that are so timely.

As you suggest, I did see evolution as a metaphor for how the characters in both books develop. Fiction loves those moments when a character sees that the way she thought about herself and her world is faulty. As the title of Reading by Lightning implies, this awareness may come the way a lightning bolt illuminates the landscape in a storm, although the process of actually transforming the way you act in the world is often slower and subtler, as it was with Lily. As for George, his changes hurt me as I was writing them, because I really like George. He was so open and in love with the world, and he becomes less optimistic, more cynical. It was an evolution forced by brutal circumstances, and maybe it’s just as well that we don’t see what the war would have made of him in the end.

Recommended for fans of The Forgotten Garden, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and Helen Humphreys.

Isn't the world ending in 2012?: On the day after an off-year election day, Marc Ambinder notes that the top three GOP frontrunners for 2012 all have books (and big book tours) on the way in the next six months: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney.

Speaking for all PWBJHTPMMATOK?s: At the NYT, novelist/ironist Colson Whitehead celebrates the one-year anniversary of Obama's election (and the apparent end of all racism forever) by offering to be the first secretary of postracial affairs: "Some changes will be minor. In television, 'Diff’rent Strokes' and 'What’s Happening!!' will now be known as 'Different Strokes' and 'What Is Happening?'"

You think our Top 100 is long...: The longlist for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced yesterday. The award is notable both for offering the "world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English" (€100,000), and for having the longest longlist imaginable (156 titles, based on nominations from libraries worldwide). 2008 Booker winner The White Tiger received the most library nominations.

Trois livres puissantes: The big literary prize week in France continues, following the awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes, with the Prix Médicis prizes given to two North American writers: Haitian-Canadian Dany Laférriere for L'énigme du retour (available on Amazon.ca) and American Dave Eggers for the translation of What Is the What. (Interested Francophones can check out Amazon.fr's literary prizes page for more.)

Moving and shaking: The death at age 100 of anthropology and cultural theory titan Claude Lévi-Strauss (more on that later) sends his books Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind to the top of our Movers & Shakers list this morning.

(From Lyga's minimate photo shoot; caption: "What are YOU looking at?")

Quick links...
Lyga talks about the cover of the book in Melissa Walker's "Cover Stories".

Daily Show writer Josh Lieb pens a YA novel, I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President. (Galley Cat calls it "...maybe the most brilliant illustration of the Oedipus complex in the entirety of Western literature.")

The Guardian reports on Neil Gaiman and Melvin Burgess's experiments with Twitter fiction.

McSweeney's posts installment #3 of "Oh My Gawd: A Column About a Teenager Navigating Religion."

The Louisville Courier-Journal runs yet another article about how adults are reading YA. (Via Justine Larbalestier)

Nominations for the 2009 Cybils, the annual awards picked by the bloggers, have been announced, with 175 or so books nominated in the Young Adult Fiction category. Sadly, YA Wednesday favorites The Dust of 100 Dogs and Punkzilla were not among them, but many other worthy books were. Keep an eye on the blogs for reviews of all the nominees.

Happy reading, and Happy Halloween!--Heidi

"You're telling me that, in a popularity contest, my book about Walt Whitman beat out Stephenie Meyer's book about hot vampires?"

The remaining 2009 Teens Top Ten:

2. Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer

3. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

4. City of Ashes, Cassandra Clare

5. Identical, Ellen Hopkins

6. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

7. Wake, Lisa McMann

8. Untamed, P.C. and Kristin Cast

9. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart

10. Graceling, Kristin Cashore

Quick links...
School Library Journal remembers Norma Fox Mazer, author of The Missing Girl, After the Rain and Up in Seth's Room.

Bookninja ponders the real motivations behind the vampire craze, "a quiet but profound sexual revolution and a new acceptance of freakiness in mainstream American life."

In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead takes readers inside an editorial pitch meeting at Alloy Entertainment, home of Gossip Girl, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and The Vampire Diaries, which, incidentally, was first pitched way back in 1989 as "Anne Rice for teens."

Speaking of vampires, the next installment in P.C. and Kristin Cast's House of Night series, Tempted comes out next week. Happy reading.--Heidi