Nat’l Book Award Judge Pulls Back Curtain
Novelist Marianne Wiggins has written an essay for the Los Angeles Times about her work on this year’s NBA fiction committee, after getting in a few jabs about how Americans are blithely ignorant of literary culture, even her creative writing students at USC. Is she patting herself on the back when she says she read 258 novels in three months, while “it’s pertinent to note that outside of a Bible and a phone book, many households in the United States probably own (and read) zero works of serious fiction?” You be the judge; for myself, when something is “pertinent to note,” I’d like it to be a little more than “probably” true.
It is, however, instructive to see how, if Wiggins is to be believed, Philip Roth was nudged off the shortlist because “it seemed insulting to keep him on the list knowing he would lose,” and that’s how Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions got on. Though you have to wonder quite what purpose is served by revealing that Anthony Giardina and Peter Behrens were also booted off the list when the judges decided to pick everybody’s five favorite books instead of “five books we all more or less liked.”
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