Book Awards: Fiction
The end-of-the-year book awards season isn’t nearly as sexy as its equivalents in the movie, television, and music industries. Perhaps a catchier name, a la the “Oscars” (the “Twaineys”?) with a flashier trophy suitable for jubilantly thrusting into the air amid Vegas-style production numbers would grab the public’s attention more than the mostly sober National Book Awards proceedings I watched on C-Span’s “Book TV” last weekend.
The full list of National Book Award nominees and winners can be viewed here, along with links to interviews with and information about all the finalists.
In the fiction category, won by Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, other nominees were Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba, and Salvatore Scibona’s The End.
Another notable finalist was Marilynne Robinson’s Home. After a twenty-four year span between her first and second novels, Robinson’s acclaimed third novel appeared a mere four years later. Admirers of 2004’s remarkable Gilead will be equally interested in Robinson’s new novel, which tells a parallel story set in the same small Iowa town in the 1950s.
Robinson revisits Gilead’s themes of crippling Calvinist guilt and the tensions between judgement and forgiveness, this time through the eyes of the returning, sort-of-prodigal son of a close friend of Gilead’s protagonist, John Ames. The new novel further powerfully explores the meaning of returning home to face the secrets and injuries of the past. One reviewer at powells.com notes that as she read Home, the following line from Robert Frost echoed in her head: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
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Tim Tharp was a Finalist for Young People’s Literature ! http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2008_ypl_tharp.html
Tim Tharp lives in Oklahoma where he writes novels and teaches in the Humanities Department at Rose State College. (and there is an interview with him.) Yeah Tim.