The Month-Long Nat’l Book Award Debate Begins

“Funny how Stephen King took shots at FSG for under-publishing Fieldwork,” emails Ain’t It Cool News book critic Frank Bascombe of Mischa Berlinksi‘s presence on the fiction shortlist, “and lo and behold, someone read it.” He’s not the only media observer commenting on the shortlist, and he’s certainly not going to be the last. Over at his NY Times blog Paper Cuts, Dwight Garner calls the list “interesting and not miserably strange,” while David Ulin uses the LA Times blog, Jacket Copy, to praise the nominees as “a hell of a list” and “a sharp rebuke to anyone who might suggest that literary culture in this country is at risk.”

Reuters picked up on the National Book Foundation‘s announcement that, “for the first time in years, the nonfiction category does not include books specifically about 9/11, Islam, and the Middle East.” (With a history of the CIA and Christopher Hitchen‘s assault on religion leading the shortlist, though, not to mention a backgrounder on the U.S. Constitution, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that America’s fascination with the root causes of the War on Terror isn’t over yet.) AP correspondent Hillel Italie delivered the first major coverage of the shortlist I saw mentioning the shadow list of unnominated titles, including the latest novels by Junot Diaz, Michael Chabon, and Richard Russo. NYT reporter Patricia Cohen, by contrast, turns in a much more conventional recap, with very little in the way of observation.

What do I think, you ask? I’ve got a lot of reading ahead of me in the next month, that’s what I think.

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