The National Book Awards were announced last night at a black-tie dinner at Cipriani's in New York with more than 700 in attendance. Mark Doty, an occasional contributor to the L.A. Times book review pages and a former judge for the L.A. Times Book Prizes, received the poetry award for his collection, "Fire to Fire" (he's pictured above at a 2007 not-black-tie conference). Peter Matthiessen took the award for fiction for "Shadow Country" despite the occasional grumbling that it was less one new book than a combination and revision of three old books. Nonfiction went to surprise winner Annette Gordon-Reed for "The Hemingses of Monticello," and Judy Blundell won the children's literature award for "What I Saw and Why I Lied." Each winner will receive $10,000.
With less fanfare (they sent out a press release), the Lannan Foundation has announced its 2008 literary awards and fellowships. But who needs downtown dinner when they're getting a $150,000 literary award? That big prize goes to poet August Kleinzahler. Four authors will receive $100,000, two-year fellowships: poets Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Ford, novelist Glenn Patterson and short-story writer Charles D'Ambrosio. Three book awards of $75,000 each are going to "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia" by John Gray,
"Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith" by Philip Kitcher and
"Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism"
by Sheldon S. Wolin. Additionally, the Lannan Foundation announced its upcoming residency fellows -- authors go to Marfa, Texas to write; the list includes translator Zaia Alexander, who splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin, and L.A.-based author Rubén Martinez.
In absolutely unrelated news, author Chuck Klosterman's review of the 15-years-in-the-making Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy" was posted on the Onion yesterday and has generated 667 comments so far. Go on, click; you know you're curious.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Carolyn Kellogg
Author Taylor Branch, whose trilogy "America in the King Years" has earned him the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Prize and other accolades, has joined up with his college band mates to record Beatles covers as Off Our Rocker. (That's Branch in the red shirt, although I'm not sure where he is in the earlier photo of the band as The Zookeepers). Their new album will be available next Monday; it may not win a Grammy, but it makes for a pleasant sing-along with a literary lion.
Speaking of accolades, the 2008 United States Artists Fellows were announced yesterday; each will be awarded $50,000. The 50 artists work in theater, visual arts, dance, architecture and design, media, music, crafts and traditional arts and literature. The nine literature fellows are young and old, nonfiction writers and poets and novelists. California is home two literature winners -- poet Harryette Mullen and Jeff Chang, author of "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation." The others are Forrest Gander, Barry Hannah, Joy Harjo, Tayari Jones, A. Van Jordan, Laura Kasischke and Lê Thi Diem Thúy.
Speaking of prizes: The PEN USA 2008 Literary Awards were announced yesterday too. PEN USA is the western outpost of International PEN, focusing on writers west of the Mississippi. Winners include Daniel Alarcon ("Lost City Radio") for fiction, William T. Vollman ("Poor People") for research nonfiction and Ron Kortege ("Strays") for children's literature. There will be an awards ceremony in Beverly Hills in December, featuring lifetime achievement award winner Larry Gelbart. The complete list of winners is after the jump.
Read on »
The finalists for the National Book Award were announced this morning in Chicago; the interesting list includes L.A.-based author Rachel Kushner, left, for her debut novel "Telex from Cuba." Joan Wickersham, right, is a finalist in the nonfiction category for her memoir, "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order."
The fiction finalists are an interesting mix. Both Kushner and Salvatore Scibona have been nominated for their first novels. Aleksandar Hemon is also a relative newcomer; "The Lazarus Project" is his second novel (he's also published a collection of short fiction). At the other end of the spectrum is the prolific 81-year-old Peter Matthiessen, who has written more than 20 books of nonfiction and 10 of fiction; "Shadow Country" is a hefty "new rendering" of three of these earlier novels. And falling somewhere in between is Marilynne Robinson -- a writer in her 60s with just two books of nonfiction and three novels to her credit, and who practically fills her shelves with awards each time she publishes fiction.
We'll look at all the finalists' work in more depth in the future, but for now, links to the L.A. Times coverage of these books is below.
Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon,"The Lazarus Project"
Rachel Kushner, "Telex from Cuba"
Peter Matthiessen, "Shadow Country"
Marilynne Robinson, "Home"
Salvatore Scibona, "The End"
Nonfiction
Drew Gilpin Faust, "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War"
Annette Gordon-Reed, "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"
Jane Mayer, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals"
Jim Sheeler, "Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives"
Joan Wickersham, "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order"
After the jump: the finalists in poetry and young people's literature.
Read on »
Indian author Aravind Adiga has won the 40th annual Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, "The White Tiger," it was announced today at the awards ceremony in London.
The book is described on the Man Booker Prize site as "a 'compelling, angry and darkly humorous' novel about a man's journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success. It was described by one reviewer as an 'unadorned portrait' of India seen 'from the bottom of the heap.' " In a Q&A on the site, Adiga talked about the inspiration for "The White Tiger": The novel began as an experiment of a kind. Visitors to India from South Africa or Latin America often asked me why there seemed to be so little crime in India, given the vast (and growing) disparity in wealth between the classes -- a condition that had led to much higher levels of crime in their countries. Why was it, I began to wonder, that even though rich people in India keep so many servants, and the servants have such regular and intimate access to their master's households, that the servants in India, by and large, stay so honest? What keeps the class system in place -- and what are the conditions under which it might start to crumble? I began to think of a servant in Delhi who would, cold-bloodedly, steal from his master -- and do something even worse to him. And imagining what that servant would think, and feel, and do, I began making notes that turned into this novel.
Now in its 40th year, the Man Booker Prize is awarded to an original full-length novel, written in English by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland, and published during the eligible year. Adiga is the fifth Indian novelist to win the award; he is only the third novelist to win for a first book.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo credit: Leon Neal, AFP/Getty
Images
French-born author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature today in Sweden. The Nobel Prize committee described the 68-year-old as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Le Clézio moved with his family to Nigeria as a boy for two years before returning to Nice. He has lived all over the world, including France, Mexico, Panama, England and Albuquerque, N.M. "Western culture has become too monolithic," he told news magazine Label France in 2001. "It places the greatest possible emphasis on its urban and technical side thus preventing the development of other forms of expression: religiosity and feelings, for example. The entire unknowable part of the human being is obscured in the name of rationalism. It is my awareness of this that has pushed me towards other civilisations."
The Nobel Prize biography describes some of his work: His definitive breakthrough as a novelist came with "Désert" (1980), for which he received a prize from the French Academy. This work contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants. The main character, the Algerian guest worker Lalla, is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society.
During the same period, Le Clézio published the meditative essay collections "L’extase matérielle" (1967), "Mydriase" (1973) and "Haï" (1971), the last of which shows influences from Indian culture. Long stays in Mexico and Central America in the period 1970 to 1974 were of decisive significance for his work, and he left the big cites in search of a new spiritual reality in the contact with the Indians....
"Le cercheur d’or" (1985; "The Prospector," 1993) treats material from the islands of the Indian Ocean in the spirit of the adventure story. In later years the author’s attraction to the dream of earthly paradise is apparent in books such as "Ourania" (2005) and "Raga: approche du continent invisible" (2006)....
The emphasis in Le Clézio’s work has increasingly moved in the direction of an exploration of the world of childhood and of his own family history. This development began with "Onitsha" (1991; "Onitsha," 1997), continued more explicitly with "La quarantaine" (1995) and has culminated in "Révolutions" (2003) and "L’Africain" (2004).
Some of these books may be tough to find in the U.S. in English, although "The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations," which imagines Mexico without European settlers, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993.
Chances just got a lot better that English-language versions of the work of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio will be readily available in the future.
--Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio with his wife, Marina, in 1963. Credit: Associated Press
The Nobel Prizes are being announced this week, and expectations are that the prize for literature will be announced tomorrow, Oct. 9.
Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, caused a stir when he said in an interview that "the U.S. is too isolated, too insular" to get the Nobel in Literature. "They don't translate enough, and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." He also said, "You can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world, not the United States."
Nevertheless, Philip Roth is considered to be among those in the final running for the prize. According to the Guardian, the British wagering house Ladbrokes has Italian critic Claudio Magris and Syrian poet Adonis as the two frontrunners.
We'll know tomorrow, most likely. But in the meantime -- who would you like to see get the Nobel Prize in Literature?
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photos: Nobel laureates in Literature: Doris Lessing (2007), Orhan Pamuk (2006) and Harold Pinter (2005). Credit: U. Montan
 The National Book Foundation will honor five young novelists in November during National Book Week -- the selection of 5 under 35 was announced today. This year's five are Matthew Eck, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, Nam Le and Fiona Maazel.
Eck, author of "The Farther Shore," spoke to me last year when his book, the winner of the Milkweed National Fiction prize, was selected as a pick by the LitBlog Coop; he said that he wanted the book to be "a universal war story" an "everywar -- like 'everyman' " story. Below are excerpts from that unpublished interview.
Carolyn Kellogg: The back flap mentions that you fought in Somalia -- how do you think that affects how people read the book?
Matthew Eck: I hope they don't get back there until they're done. I think people that read it and say it takes place in Somalia are doing the book a huge disservice.... When people start talking about how it takes place in Somalia, I'm all right with that, because a lot of readers will do the research and that's where they'll set it. Yeah, it might feel a lot like Somalia to me when I wrote it, but I didn't want people to only think of Somalia.... It could be anywhere, it could be anytime.
CK: I kept finding literary parallels -- the men start out on a roof, and go down, and bad things happen to them, and I couldn't help but think of Dante and his descent. And then you've got Odysseus, soldiers on mythic journeys... were any of these in your mind?
Matthew Eck: I'm a huge fan of the classics. Most of what I do to inform my own writing is read the classics. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. It was one of the reasons I joined the army. I joined the army for all those cliches that a young writer would join for -- life experience, being able to witness stuff. But then when I came back, and I started going to college, my undergraduate degree was in English literature. I read Shakespeare and Homer and Virginia Woolf and Dante and all of that.... Early on, when I was writing that book, I took a kind of buckshot approach to it, threw a whole bunch of ideas at the page. I was reading "The Odyssey" at the same time as I was reading "The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene, and it just clicked: what if it's a story about the journey home? What if it's about these guys that are lost? It's such a great metaphor, we see it all the time in literature. My little nod to the Odyssey is definitely the scene where they're racing to attack the compound and they're hiding with the sheep.
CK: You visited terrible things on this band of soldiers. You starve them, they're trying to figure out what the rules of engagement are and suddenly people shoot at them from all sides. People die slowly. As reader, it's devastating. Because it's so compressed, and the language is so tight, and terrible things happen. As a writer, living inside of that, what was that like?
Matthew Eck: My actual experiences in war, and Joshua Stantz's experience in war, started to morph. I started to feel like I owned his experience as much as he did. That poor guy! By the end I just loved that guy, when he had to make some of the choices he made, they were hard. I had to put the work down, I had to step back, ask "Do I really want this to happen to him?" -- my thought is that that helped the writing process. Because I felt so much for the boy....
I wanted the reader to feel as lost as he felt. So I had to keep creating these instances -- what is he doing out here? What is he going to do now? What's going to happen to him?
CK: Is it hard to talk about this book, which is, in places, beautifully horrific, and that you finished a while ago?
Matthew Eck: I'm working on something new -- I've been lucky, though. My editor told me, early on, when I was like "I'm trying not be distracted by this first book experience." He was like, "Your first only comes out once! You better sit back and relax and enjoy this." It's been a nice time.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Today, the MacArthur Foundation announced the 2008 recipients of its fellowships, known as "genius" grants. The list includes scientists, doctors, artists, musicians and two writers: 40-year-old Alex Ross and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 31.
Ross, longtime music critic at the New Yorker, is the author of "The Rest Is Noise," a 640-page tour of 20th century music. "What powers this amazingly ambitious book and endows it with authority," our reviewer Jamie James wrote of "The Rest Is Noise," "are the author’s expansive curiosity and refined openness of mind." He goes on to say: Like any good encyclopedist, he draws on the best existing expertise. Yet many of his most fascinating pages arise from the author’s far-ranging primary research into subjects previously known primarily to academic specialists....
Paradoxically, “The Rest Is Noise” gains much of its intellectual authority from the fearless attitude of its author toward popular culture. Ross’ erudition and grasp of the highbrow curriculum is unquestionable, but what sets him apart from most music critics is the familiar ease with which he also addresses jazz and rock, film and television. His is a sweet and generous voice.
Nigerian-born Adichie has written two novels, "Purple Hibiscus" (2003) and "Half of a Yellow Sun" (2006). Reviewing the latter in our pages, Merle Rubin writes: This superbly talented writer has tackled a broader, more ambitious subject: the civil war that took place in the decade before her birth. Between her extensive readings and her family's memories of these events, Adichie clearly has the background and understanding to write such a novel. What's more, she has also found a way of engaging this large subject on the personal level by portraying it vividly and poignantly through the eyes of well-crafted characters.
....with searching insight, compassion and an unexpected yet utterly appropriate touch of wit, Adichie has created an extraordinary book, a worthy addition to the world's great tradition of large-visioned, powerfully realistic novels.
The MacArthur Foundation awards each fellow $100,000 a year for five years. Fiction fellows are quite a cohort, including Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Octavia Butler, Lydia Davis and Colson Whitehead. Criticism is equally as impressive, with fellowships awarded to Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Irving Howe.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo credits: Alex Ross by David Michalek; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie by Okey Adichie
Maxine Hong Kingston, author of "The Woman Warrior," "China Men," "Tripmaster Monkey" and others, will receive the 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the National Book Foundation announced today.
We agree — Kingston rocks. Earlier this year, the L.A. Times gave her the Kirsch Award, which honors a living author with a substantial connection to the American West whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition. She was the award's 28th recipient.
Kingston lives in Oakland with her husband, Earl, where she is a senior lecturer emerita at the UC Berkeley and directs the Veterans Writing Group project.The National Book Foundation writes, "Kingston has employed a range of literary styles and stories in her work to create a startling new approach to immigrant memoir and fiction and influence two generations of American writers."
In 2003, Kingston was interviewed at Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., on her approach to "immigrant memoir": Maxine Hong Kingston: The way that I wrote when my mother and father were both alive was very different than the way I write now. In "Woman Warrior" and "China Men," I wrote their stories in such a way that I protected them from being deported. Both of them were illegal aliens, and I wrote about their coming from China to Cuba to America. I made up a new genre that is a mix of reality and imagination, and I did that because I was thinking that if immigration authorities read my books they could not find evidence to deport my parents. Now that they are dead, I am very clear about what is fiction and what is nonfiction, and I draw the boundaries very strictly. I am able to say that they were illegals and they were stowaways and he won her a visa at the gambling table. Everything they did was illegal! And they always told me, "Don't tell these things!" So I did tell, but I did it in a new and strange kind of way.
Now that they are gone, I mean to just go back and retell everything and sort it out and say, This is real. This is not real.
Powells: The Cultural Studies people are going to kill you if you do that!
Maxine Hong Kingston: I know. Oh, God, I know!
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Eric Risberg / Associated Press
Salman Rushdie and John Berger might have been surprised when the Booker Prize shortlist was announced today and neither of their names was on it.
Earlier this year, Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" was selected as the Best of the Bookers as part of the prize's 40th anniversary — but that wasn't enough to put his most recent novel, "The Enchantress of Florence," into the final six heading for the prize this year.
Berger, who has a colorful history with the Booker — when he won in 1972 for "G.", he objected to the source of the Booker's prize money and gave half his award to the Black Panther Party of England. The conflict brought increased attention to the prize, but the British were about as happy at the politicizing move as Americans were when Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the stage in 1973 when he won an Oscar for "The Godfather." But the past is the past, as the 81-year-old Berger made the Booker longlist for his novel "From A to X." When it came to the shortlist, being an octogenarian made no difference.
Seniority, in fact, might have been working against both authors. Two of the final six — Steve Toltz with "A Fraction of the Whole" and Aravind Adiga with "The White Tiger" — are first-time novelists.
Two were longlisted once before, both in 2002. This year, Linda Grant (the only female author still in the running) is up for her book "The Clothes on Their Backs," while Philip Hensher is up for "The Northern Clemency" (which won't be available in the U.S. until early 2009).
Of this year's six, Sebastian Barry ("The Secret Scripture") has gotten the closest to the elusive Booker; he made the shortlist in 2005. Amitav Ghosh — nominated for "Sea of Poppies" — is new to the Booker race. And it is a race — in England, the Booker is handicapped by bookies.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Liz O. Baylen, Los Angeles Times
The Dylan Thomas Prize, all $119,938.38 (or £60,000) of it, is awarded annually to one skilled, not-yet-30-year-old writer. This weekend, the 14 authors on the prize's long list were announced. One finalist -- Dinaw Mengestu -- has already done well in the awards department, winning the Guardian's 2007 First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times' 2007 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
Authors can hail from any country in the world, as long as they write in English. The long list is:
Priya Basil (U.K.) for the novel "Ishq and Mushq"
Susan Barker (U.K.) for the novel "The Orientalist and the Ghost"
Caroline Bird (U.K.) for the poetry collection "Trouble Came to the Turnip"
Zoë Brigley (U.K.) for the poetry collection "The Secret"
Ben Dolnick (U.S.) for the novel "Zoology"
Ceridwen Dovey (South Africa) for the novel "Blood Kin"
Joe Dunthorne (U.K.) for the novel "Submarine"
Susan Fletcher (U.K.) for the novel "Oystercatchers"
Adam Green (U.K.) for the novel "Satsuma Sun - Mover"
Edward Hogan (U.K.) for the novel "Blackmoor"
Porochista Khakpour (Iran) for the novel "Sons and Other Flammable Objects"
Nam Le (Vietnam) for the short story collection "The Boat"
Dinaw Mengestu (Ethiopia) for "Children of the Revolution" (published in the U.S. as "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears")
Kei Miller (Jamaica) for the poetry collection "There Is an Anger That Moves"
Ross Raisin (U.K.) for the novel "God's Own Country" (published in the U.S. as "Out Backward")
Karen Russell (U.S.) for the short story collection "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves"
Just being nominated is an honor. But I bet it's hard to remember that winning isn't everything when the prize is nearly $120,000.
Carolyn Kellogg
photo of author Nam Le reading in Los Angeles by Carolyn Kellogg
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