It's award season

Say what you will about literary prizes, but over the last three years the National Book Award has become the cream of the crop. Last year, the National Book Foundation's fiction award went to Richard Powers' monumental "The Echo Maker." In 2005, the NBA was the first major national book prize to honor the achievement of William T. Vollmann, one of the most ambitious, if difficult, novelists working in the United States.

The 2007 NBA finalists were announced this morning, and, as expected, they're an eclectic bunch. Among the nonfiction honorees are Edwidge Danticat's blistering family memoir, "Brother, I’m Dying," and Christopher Hitchens' anti-religious diatribe, "God Is Not Great." The young people's literature list includes Sherman Alexie's first young adult novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," and Brian Selznick's genre-busting "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," which tells its story half in pictures and half in words.

The fiction finalists, in particular, represent a who's who of writers to whom we ought to pay attention: Lydia Davis, for her collection of short stories, "Varieties of Disturbance"; Denis Johnson for his Vietnam War epic "Tree of Smoke"; and the woefully under-appreciated Jim Shepard, whose new collection, "Like You'd Understand, Anyway," continues his investigations into the shadow territory between mass culture and literary art. My own reservations about the Johnson novel notwithstanding, the judges who put these three writers on a single short list understand what their business is about.

On some level, I suppose, this may have to do with the debacle of the 2004 National Book Awards, when the fiction finalists were widely criticized for being too insular (only one of the five books selected had sold more than 2,000 copies). But in the end, that's probably too simplistic, for the NBA award has been no stranger to controversy over the years. In 2003, Harold Bloom created a stir when he attacked as "egregious" the decision to give Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; Bloom also walked out of the 1998 prize ceremony after his "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" lost the nonfiction award to Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family."

More to the point, the foundation that administers the prizes seems to have recognized that there need be no real divide between good books and books that people actually want to read. Looking at this latest short list, you see a lot of writers who’ve been working a little bit below the radar, a lot of writers who haven't been recognized at this level of visibility before. This, I would suggest, is the true function of literary awards — to direct our attention, to push literature forward by eschewing safe choices, by identifying excellence wherever it is found.

Either way, it's a hell of a list, and a sharp rebuke to anyone who might suggest that literary culture in this country is at risk.

David L. Ulin