Awards

Yesterday the Literary Review announced the shortlist for their annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award; a list that includes a rock star, a Nobel Prize favorite, and of course, Philip Roth.

Roth (photo by Nancy Crampton, via HMH) was nominated for a racy scene in "The Humbling." Oz, the gamblers' former favorite for the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, was nominated for "Rhyming Life and Death." Rock star Nick Cave earned his nod for "The Death of Bunny Munro," and his publisher told the Guardian they were pleased with the shortlist appearance.

Here's a particularly juicy passage from a previous nominee, "The Whole World Over" by Julia Glass. "And then before her inner eye, a tide of words leaped high and free, a chaotic joy like frothing rapids: truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous, rivulet, violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity ... all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly chain ... a release of something deep in the core of her altered brain, words she thought she'd lost for good."

The complete list is after the jump, via the Guardian...

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A photo of the four National Book Award winners for 2009, post-ceremony...

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Colum McCann wins the National Book Award for Fiction for "Let the Great World Spin." "Stories are the purest form of engagement...American publishing is able to embrace the other... As Dave Eggers said, we have to take this honor as a challenge." GalleyCat interviewed the novelist before the ceremony, here's an excerpt: watch his thoughts about Stephenie Meyer's Twilight here.

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Tonight the publishing world gathers for the National Book Awards, a combination of the Academy Awards ceremony, a fairytale ball, and a high school prom for writers.

Don't worry about buying a tuxedo, because GalleyCat will be covering the event. Senior editor Ron Hogan will be twittering about the event and editor Jason Boog will handle the good old fashioned blogging duties. There may even be some web video surprises.

The dinner and ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street. The event will be hosted by author, comedian, and actor Andy Borowitz. Read all about the NBA finalists here.

Journalist Linden MacIntyre won the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his book, 'The Bishop's Man,' taking home a prize of $50,000 (in Canadian currency).

Fans of the Canadian literary prize entered the "Guess the Giller" contest, predicting the winner for a chance to win a trip to Toronto with $1,000 in spending money. The pool of potential winners may be a small one, however. Out of all the finalists, MacIntyre's book was ranked fourth by popular prediction.

The jury had this statement about the book: "'The Bishop's Man' centres on a sensitive topic - the sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests on the innocent children in their care. Father Duncan, the first person narrator, has been his bishop's dutiful enforcer, employed to check the excesses of priests and, crucially, to suppress the evidence. But as events veer out of control, he is forced into painful self-knowledge as family, community and friendship are torn apart under the strain of suspicion, obsession and guilt. A brave novel, conceived and written with impressive delicacy and understanding."

The Center for Fiction presented its fourth annual First Novel Prize to John Pipkin for Woodsburner, a retelling of an incident in the life of young Henry David Thoreau, at a private ceremony last night in New York City. The other nominees for the award were Philipp Meyer, Patrick Somerville, Paul Harding, and Yiyun Li. In some respects, the cocktail reception before the ceremonial dinner felt like a sneak preview of next week's National Book Awards reception, as many of New York's top book editors came out to celebrate one of their own—Gerald Howard, the recipient of the Center's Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement in editing fiction.

As a sidenote: The Center also announced that the First Novel Prize, which was known as the Sargent Prize from 2006 to 2008, would be renamed the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize beginning in 2010. The new sponsorship comes from financial writer and Center board member Nancy Dunnan, in memory of her father, Ray Flaherty.

Since she spent years living in between New York City and Alaska, Joan Kane's poetry crisscrosses two vastly different worlds. In this video interview, she described how these two places influenced her new book, "The Cormorant Hunter's Wife."

Kane was one of the ten writers honored at the 25th annual Whiting Writers' Awards last week. GalleyCat prowled the aisles of the 2009 Whiting Awards, interviewing a number of the winners about their writing lives, the recession, and the future of literature. The ten recipients each took home a $50,000 award for their literary efforts.

Here's more about the author: "Kane is Irish and Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University ... In 2009 her play, 'The Gilded Tusk,' won the Anchorage Museum theater contest."

Last week an edition of L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz" re-imagined by artist Graham Rawle won Book of the Year at the 2009 British Book Design and Production Awards.

The UK version of the book was published by Atlantic Books, and Counterpoint/Soft Skull published the American edition. The 352-page book was filled with handcrafted photographs by the artist.

Here's more from former Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash: "Rawle has stripped the epic story of Dorothy's journey to Oz of all remnants of Hollywood iconography. Gone are the Judy Garland braids, the Technicolor ruby slippers, the ethereal Glinda the Good Witch. In their place, Rawle has fashioned characters and scenery that are at once relentlessly modern and also devoutly loyal to Baum's original text." (Via Richard Nash)

"Think about the whole of things, as opposed to thinking about right now or about how much there is to eat at the moment or what the problem is necessarily today," said poet Jericho Brown when asked to give advice to young poets.

Brown was one of the ten writers honored at the 25th annual Whiting Writers' Awards this week. GalleyCat prowled the aisles of the 2009 Whiting Awards, interviewing a number of the winners about their writing lives, the recession, and the future of literature. The ten recipients each took home a $50,000 award for their literary efforts.

Here's more about the author, from his website: "Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University."

"Congratulations to all ten of you. I'll put you all in my blog." author Margaret Atwood told the 2009 Whiting Writers' Award recipients last night. She delivered some droll advice for the winners: "Write a cookbook or a book about vampires. Or troll through the classics, adding monsters...Or, better yet, write a vampire cookbook."

Last night, ten authors received a $50,000 check from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, part of the 25th annual Whiting Writers' Awards. Since 1985, the philanthropic foundation has given emerging creative writers these grants. Previous winners have included: "Denis Johnson, Michael Cunningham, Alice McDermott, and Colson Whitehead. The complete list of winners follows after the jump.

GalleyCat was there, shooting video interviews with the winners and finding out more about Atwood's recent foray into the world of Twitter. "It's been quite a lot of fun. I can send out desperate tweets and 15 people will answer my question," she explained after the ceremony. Twitter hadn't corrupted her writing style, she concluded: "It's a descendant of the telegram. Telegrams required succinctness because they charged by the word. It's a message."

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When the National Book Award nominations were announced earlier this afternoon, we were struck by one book in particular: David Small's graphic novel Stitches, one of the five finalists in the Young People's Literature category. What puzzled us was that we remembered all the buzz surrounding Stitches at this year's BookExpo America, and we hadn't gotten any impression that this was YA material—yes, it's an autobiographical comic book about the writer/artist's adolescence, but so is Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

"There was a question among the judges [in the young people's literature category]," Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, told us when we called asking about the nomination, "but it ultimately depends on where the publisher nominates the book, and this is where [Norton] nominated it."

"We always intended to submit Stitches in the young people's category," confirmed Erin Sinesky Lovett, Norton's assistant director of publicity. "We knew it would appeal to a YA audience as well as an adult audience." She added that because Small had never written for an adult readership before, the graphic novel could be seen as a "transitional" work, building from his distinguished background as a children's book writer and illustrator, and observed that the story was "age-appropriate" for teen readers who grew up on Small's earlier work.

We took another quick look at the book this afternoon, and though we'll be re-reading it closely just to make sure, we can't argue with that. And thus David Small becomes the second graphic novelist (after Gene Luen Yang to be in the running for a National Book Award—we'll see what happens at the awards ceremony next month!

(And, in a neat twist, it's now the second consecutive year Small's illustrated an NBA nominee—he also did the artwork for Kathi Appelt's The Underneath.)