And the winners of this year's National Book Awards are:- Fiction: Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country
- Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
- Young People's Literature: Judy Blundell's What I Saw and How I Lied
- Poetry: Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems
The New York Times reports the opinion of Harod Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, on the controversy:
It wasn’t really a controversy. ... It was as much a head-scratcher as anything else. ... We allow collections of previously published material ... Collected poems, collected essays, short-story collections — books like that. We don’t allow reprints, but we didn’t consider this a reprint. There’s a lot of new writing here.
2 comments:
All of those books look good to me.
I was very surprised when I read that Shadow Country was actually a rewrite of his Everglades trilogy into one new volume. I wondered if it should qualify, but if it's the best thing out there in fiction, people should know that. It's also interesting that a writer with 20 more years of experience under his belt than when he began the books should get to go back and make the best parts of it even stronger. A rarity I'm sure. It will be interesting to see what people who've read both have to say about it.
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