Which literary prize is the best indicator of quality?

The Nobel has a lot of egregious misses, but past the first 20 years or so pretty much all the winners are worth reading.

The Booker is clearly the worse. Never read a bad Pulitzer or Nobel winner, but haven't really read that many of either. My personal answer has got to be Hugo or Nebula as I'm an SF junkie and anything either of them endorse is bound to press at least a few of my buttons. Don't really know the difference between the two though.

The Pulitzer winners I've read have mostly been history, not fiction, but what I've read was quite worthy. The Nobel is less easy to evaluate, because translations are not originals and the prize covers all an author's work, not a particular title.

The Nobel is less easy to evaluate, because translations are not originals

dispute this framing, it's not like reading a translation is just hearing a description of something

hugo but really nobel

there are plenty of awful nobel winners. hugo is the only one that has influenced any reading decision i've made as an adult but that's largely cuz i'm no sf buff. i can remember taking the newbery medal pretty seriously in kindergarten, first grade, though i think i preferred reading caldecott winners.

Whether or not you buy into his disdain for the Pulitzer, Gass's essay on literary prizes remains hilarious:

Well, what a pleasant supposition: to receive a prize, a famous one at that, with considerable prestige and the presumption of increased sales as well as other benefits. Why should such a compliment to your art be denied; why should the thought be unlikely, the award embarrassing, the fact nightmarish? Because the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill - not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/gass-prizes.html

national book award gets it 'right' more often than the pulitzer as far as i can tell but the pulitzer's occasional 'fuck it - NOBODY WINS' tantrums are super amusing so i might give it the nod on that basis, think gravity's rainbow specifically being denied the pulitzer says more about it than it winning the national book award

i havent read a word of the majority of the nobel laureates and am willing to believe that the epic prose of henryk sienkiewicz is pretty terrible but the list also has some of my favorite writers ever so

I think I've read more NBA finalists that were quality vs actual NBA winners
not listed but the PEN/Malamud for short fiction is pretty good

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Medal

Was gonna say Pulitzer until I remembered the 2012 travesty ... So Hugo it is ...

it's not like reading a translation is just hearing a description of something

Translations of prose fiction will get the substance (plot, characters, setting) right, and usually pick up a fair amount of a writer's style, but literature at a high level suffers when the finer nuances of prose style are lost, and I guarantee you that the majority of translations will lose some of that nuance. This becomes apparent if you read three different translations of almost any classic novel. At the end of the exercise you know you've read three versions of the same story, but not the same story three times.

My favorite novel of the last 10 years was a Man Booker winner: The Line of Beauty.

It's going to come down to worthy vs fashionable and for that reason I choose the Pulitzer

The sci-fi prizes are actually great in that the judges really, honestly, care about the quality of the product. If only that virtue could be translated to literary prizes in general. The only reason I'm not voting for the sci-fi prizes here is that quality from the p.o.v. of a sci-fi prize judge isn't exactly the same as quality from my p.o.v.

NBA, finalist or winner, is the only medal on a cover I trust.

Surprised to hear the Pulitzer love. I've found their fiction winners to generally be pretty bad, but they are fairly reliable for Non-Fiction.

My favorite novel of the last 10 years was a Man Booker winner: The Line of Beauty.

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

That is a good book. There've been a number of other good Booker winners too. But more than any other prize it seems to award the middlebrow and unambitious.

NBA, finalist or winner, is the only medal on a cover I trust.

― i have the new brutal HOOS if you want it (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, February 13, 2014 9:21 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also I was beaten to the gass punch for once

The Booker winners might be the worst, idk, but I'm pretty sure I've found more enjoyable books by looking at their nominees/finalists than any of the others.

Translations of prose fiction will get the substance (plot, characters, setting) right, and usually pick up a fair amount of a writer's style, but literature at a high level suffers when the finer nuances of prose style are lost, and I guarantee you that the majority of translations will lose some of that nuance. This becomes apparent if you read three different translations of almost any classic novel. At the end of the exercise you know you've read three versions of the same story, but not the same story three times.

this is a different thread, but I could not disagree with your more except insofar as you're not getting "the same thing." with a good translation, you're getting something just as good; there isn't any such thing as a single translation, since translation is its own art, so you can get several competing translations that are just as good. but the idea of the original having some mystic intangible quality that can't be expressed through translation is a silly one imo.

Every author's prose has its own style and rhythm, undoubtedly the translation is not exactly the same as the original because languages, cultures, etc. are different. But that doesn't mean that they cannot be just as good as the original.

Translated poetry is a different thing. That's always a bit touch and go, especially if the author uses a lot of wordplay or rhyming. And there are several foreign language poets who have won the Nobel.

Some great Booker winners: Schindler's Ark, The Remains of the Day, The Ghost Road, Last Orders, Disgrace, The Line of Beauty, The Gathering, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies. Shortlists are often strong too. Very few really dud years.

hugo is only as valuable as it is because so much sf is trash

unlike "literary fiction"

i might vote newbery. nothing but the truth ruled so hard. altho i guess that just got an "honor".

think gravity's rainbow specifically being denied the pulitzer says more about it than it winning the national book award

balls otm

Yeah that's one of my favourite facts

hugo is only as valuable as it is because so much sf is trash

― flopson, Thursday, February 13, 2014 12:35 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

unlike "literary fiction"

― i want to say one word to you, just one word:buzzfeed (difficult listening hour), Thursday, February 13, 2014 12:38 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.sfsignal.com/mt-static/images/Theodore_Sturgeon.gif
hi dere

Yeah, every time someone asks me why my dream-job is to study Gravity's Rainbow full time, I will tell that story about the Pullitzer, and people understand.

I'm reading it for the first time atm, it's exactly what I wanted it to be :-)

Oh that should prob have been one of these for Louis :D

unlike "literary fiction"

― i want to say one word to you, just one word:buzzfeed (difficult listening hour), Thursday, February 13, 2014 12:38 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's a lot more sf out there than literary fiction though

guys let's not have that tired old argument here. I recommend you look for an m. john harrison blog post called "on both yr houses."

I get the sense that the Hugo, Nebula, and Edgars are respected by fans of the genre but I don't know enough about them to comment one way or the other.

there are plenty of awful nobel winners. hugo is the only one that has influenced any reading decision i've made as an adult but that's largely cuz i'm no sf buff

yeah, this. hugo has been a good guide to worthwhile SF for me.

a bit hard to fairly judge these as an adult but all the caldecott winners i've read have been good:

http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/caldecottmedal/caldecottwinners/caldecottmedal

Would like to take this opportunity to recommend the Edgar-winning The Confession by Domenic Stansberry.

James: just skimmed that blogpost, it seemed to namedrop a lot of british people & i'm not sure what the relevance is. i was saying that hugo is the only one i have ever used as an indicator of quality at a second hand bookshop, because there is a lot of sf and a lot of it is trashy/tossed off. literary fiction i p much only check out based on recommendations/reviews

Relevance is, at this point sf and literary fiction are both genres so that, in line with Sturgeon's law, a lot of stuff is going to be bad in both of them. Finding out what the good stuff is in each and agreeing with other people about it is another matter.

All true, but with literary fiction it's easier for me to find reliable reviews, descriptions, recommendations, etc. that I trust so I don't need to resort to lists. For sci-fi I just don't have the same resources.

Really? I find too many people like kind of run-of-the-mill stuff that's got the "literary" imprimatur and I have been burned and bored one too many times.
Back to original question, I guess the Nobel in literature is kind of notorious for having a bad batting average with respect to posterity. With some of the other awards, I wouldn't read something or not read something just because it won, but I might go over the list to see whether something caught my attention for some other reason, or to be reminded of old favorites that perhaps need to be revisited. Speaking of which, here is article about National Book Award upset in 1962: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/11/_1962_national_book_awards_scandal_the_story_behind_the_moviegoer.html

i remember that article. it's really kind of mindblowing how many great books were up for the award in '62.

The penultimate paragraph of that article is perfectly apropos for this thread

So if what happened in 1962 reminds us of the worst of what a literary fete can entail—infighting, a cliquish grievance made into national news—we should remember it also demonstrates the best. What are prizes for, in the end? Sure, the culture machine needs them, publicity departments and the gaggle of blogs, but does literature? The glitzy rah-rah of the awards dinner, the indignation suffered on the losers’ behalf: None of it factors into the progression of tradition. What the Booker, Pulitzer, and National Book Awards pretend to accomplish—identifying which works of poetry and prose are superior—takes generations to work out, and we can all name authors, the Julia Peterkins and Conrad Richters, who are known today only for being forgotten, who claimed one medal or many in their lifetime but whose work no longer resonates. Rescuing an overlooked but deserving title—that’s the most these awards can do, and Percy, though he had gotten a late start, would never have to worry about securing a publisher or a readership again.

Is The Moviegoer regarded now as being bad? or significantly worse than Catch-22? I haven't read either. Surely, the Moviegoer has more kudos than The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor which won the pullitzer the same year?

of those mentioned in the article Revolutionary Road is the one which has gained critical ground and readers (even before the film) and i loathed that book. I like Salinger's Zooey a whole lot though.

I didn't warm to The Moviegoer but that's a taste thing. It's clearly an impressive, original piece of work that's still in print and appears on lists of the best American novels and it's no embarrassment as a winner.

No, the poit about The Moviegoer is that it is the exception, the book that won the award that not only deserved it but kind of needed to win, maybe over other deserving candidates, in order for it and the author to get a readership, sort of an optimal outcome.

Sure, I was just answering jed's question. It needed it more then Heller or Salinger for sure. Not sure what Revolutionary Road was selling.

Sure, I was responding to his post as well, not yours. Usually I put "xpost" but this one time I decided to leave it off because somebody once gave me grief for overdoing that. I guess I will go back to my old ways.

Ha ha. Sorry.

For what it's worth, I think the Nobel's bad batting average is overstated. And most of the criticisms are like "look at all these old winners I've never heard of" instead of "look at all these old winners I read and thought were bad". I've often found when I've gone back and explored the obscure winners, their books have been good (e.g. Fall of the King By Johannes Jensen, Aniara by Harry Martinson, Giosue Carducci's poetry)

I like the moviegoer although its not my favourite Percy

Really? I would assume then that it was The Last Gentleman, or maybe the linguistics book Signposts ? Signposts in a Strange Land? but this being the board it is, maybe it is one of the others.

Probably the Nobel, but only for the last few decades.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING

CAREFUL NOW

Are y'all really gonna put fucking Neil Gaiman over Faulkner, Beckett and Morrison?

The future is uncertain

that's not really the point, though.

Damn I didn't know that American Gods won the Hugo and Nebula. Well that certainly gives me the final push to not vote for them.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Poor nebula

sf wuz robbed. again

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18dxero3iaewdjpg/original.jpg

shameful

coteries writers of minimum distinction

s

I need to read The Moviegoer again, I didn't get anything out of it years ago but so many people I trust proclaim its wonders.

Misread that as "Procrustean wonders."

I guess I kind of get the Hugo vote but I'm shocked to see Pulitzer beat out NBA!

Yeah, that's just wrong. Gravity's Rainbow. End of discussion.

Glad I voted for NBA

Pulitzer getting so high seems to make no sense, as looking over the past 20 or so years of winners the only relevant ones I see are Gilead and The Road (far from the best McCarthy anyways). But, the list of winners is actually really solid through the late 80's.

Lol difficult listening hour. I read Nothing But the Truth when I was in eighth grade, and it has continued to influence how I encounter the media even now. It should be required reading for all middle schoolers imo.

Otherwise hoos/wins otm. Voted NBA.