McCarthy, Eggers Among Finalists for Book Critics Awards
Associated Press
Sunday, January 21, 2007; D03
NEW YORK, Jan. 20 -- Acclaimed novels by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford and Dave Eggers, all passed over last fall for the National Book Awards, were among the finalists announced Saturday for the 33rd annual National Book Critics Circle prize.
Other fiction nominees included Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss," winner last year of Britain's Man Booker Prize, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun."
Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings" were both nominated for general nonfiction. "At Canaan's Edge," the third of Taylor Branch's award-winning trilogy about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, was a biography finalist.
Winners will be announced March 8. There are no cash prizes.
McCarthy was nominated for "The Road." Ford was cited for "The Lay of the Land."
Two fiction nominees were based on civil wars in Africa: "Half of a Yellow Sun" is set during the Nigerian conflict that broke out in 1967 and left more than 1 million dead, while Eggers's "What Is the What" is a fictionalized memoir of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the Sudanese civil war of the 1980s and 1990s.
Besides Pollan and Schama, nonfiction finalists were Patrick Cockburn's "The Occupation," Ann Fessler's "The Girls Who Went Away" and Sandy Tolan's "The Lemon Tree." Nominees for biography included Debby Applegate's "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher," Julie Phillips's "James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon," Frederick Brown's "Flaubert" and Jason Roberts' "A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler."
"Strange Piece of Paradise," in which author Terri Jentz writes of a traumatic bike trip from the 1970s, when she and a friend were attacked by an ax-wielding man, was nominated for best memoir. Others cited were Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home," Alexander Masters' "Stuart: A Life Backwards," Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost" and Donald Antrim's "The Afterlife."
Poetry finalists were 81-year-old W.D. Snodgrass, Daisy Fried,Frederick Siedel, and Troy Jollimore. The finalists for criticism: Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept," Frederick Crews' "Follies of the Wise," Daniel C. Dennett's "Breaking the Spell," Lawrence Weschler's "Everything That Rises" and Lia Purpura's "On Looking."
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Monday, 22 January 2007 09:58 (eighteen years ago)
Surprised to see the Inheritance of Loss listed, not a worthy winner of the Booker IMO and it would seem slightly preposterous if it won two major prizes. Desai writes very beautifully in flashes, in a rather traditional "poetic style", and my impression is that she understands the very different social milieus she describes very well. So far so good. But she knows that her poetic style is her best card and she overplays it, meandering into excessive descriptive detail to the point where parts of the novel are a dull, stodgy read. Other novelistic virtues - pace, plot, characterisation - are pretty much absent. And while her political analysis will strike most Western liberals as unexceptionable, she doesn't bring any fresh or penetrating insight to bear either.
― frankiemachine (frankiemachine), Monday, 22 January 2007 20:11 (eighteen years ago)