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They’d Like to Thank the Academy….

Holy poopsticks, Readers! Awards season has hit like Sarah Palin at a book-burning bonfire.

On Tuesday, the Booker Prize was awarded to Aravind Adiga for his debut novel The White Tiger. Adiga, 33, is one of the youngest winners in history. The White Tiger is about the son of a rickshaw puller who longs for a better life. It is a “powerful story of the darker side of contemporary India,” HarperCollins editor Karthika V.K. said. Adiga — who Karthika describes as “quiet” and “reclusive” — is also known for a popular column he wrote in The Guardian detailing what it’s like being a bachelor in Mumbai — which is, apparently, a bit of a sketchy thing (single men in Mumbai tend to be looked on rather suspiciously if they don’t work for a huge multinational corporation or have a wife in some far-off land). The Booker is awarded yearly to the best novel by a writer from Britain, Ireland, or a Commonwealth country; previous winners include Iris Murdoch, J.M. Coetzee, and Ian McEwan. The Prize comes with an $87,000 check.

Stateside, the National Book Foundation has named its nominees for the 2008 National Book Award. Here they is!

Fiction

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Nonfiction

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
(W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)

Poetry

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

Young People’s Literature

Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)

The National Book Awards, founded in 1950, celebrate the best of American literature. They will be given out November 19 in New York City.

Story Source Yahoo, National Book Foundation | Image Source Discovery Education

October 15, 2008 | Filed Under Eyes on the Prize, Newsies

Comments

One Response to “They’d Like to Thank the Academy….”

lenen on August 12th, 2010 1:02 pm

Over de voor- en nadelen van het afsluiten van een lening zonder BKR-toetsing.

Comment away, my little snarkie-pies. But please play nicely. Poopy-pants comments (spam, hate speech) will be flushed down the shitter.

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