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Troy
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Troy
Post Number: 1025
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 05, 2008 - 01:42 pm: | 
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The complete list was complied by Publishers Weekly
Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf)http://authors.aalbc.com/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie.htm
Coretta Scott King Author Award
Sharon M. Draper for
Copper Sun (S&S/Atheneum)
http://aalbc.com/books/related.htm
Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award
Kadir Nelson for
Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom
http://aalbc.com/books/2007_csk_winners.htm
The full list:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA651560 5 |
Emanuel
Veteran Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 479
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 05, 2008 - 09:50 pm: |
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Let's hope the losers are more gracious than Faith Hill was at the CMA awards when Carrie Underwood won Best Female Performer of the Year. Check out the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyZRiEJnIag |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 310
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 05, 2008 - 10:25 pm: |
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Troy,
Next up are the National Book Critics Circle Awards. The finalists in six categories -- fiction, general nonfiction, biography, autobiography, criticism, and poetry (plus lifetime achievement and a citation for excellence in reviewing) -- will be announced on January 12th.
Last year Chimananda Ngozi Adichie lost to Kiran Desai in fiction and Simon Schama won in nonfiction for Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution.
Last Month the NBCC conducted a poll of 500 writers (including "heavies" like Updike and Ozick) and more than 300 of their member critics for the best fiction and nonfiction books of 2007. It was an All-Hispañola sweep with Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz taking top honors, which might be an indicator of things to come.
Scroll down to "Introducing the NBCC's Best Recommend List" for the top books (the long lists follow a little farther downthread).
http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html
I notice that Bliss Broyard's One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life (which also made the Essence list) finished about ten places ahead of Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison, and I would expect both to make the short lists in autobiography and biography respectively. I would also expect Edwidge Danticat's book to be competing against Bliss Broyard's.
PS My favorite African American fiction book of 2007, "Man Gone Down" by Michael Thomas, didn't even make the list. In fact, I wasn't hip to it until the NY Times chose it as one of their 10 Best Books of 2007. I'd describe it as Another Country meets Good Will Hunting (which is why I'm not recommending it on this board!).
Here's an interview with the author (I'm not familiar with the interviewer) alongside the NY Times review:
http://www.danaroc.com/inspiring_031907michaelthomas.html
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Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 311
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, January 06, 2008 - 02:34 pm: |
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Winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction:
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
I liked this book. It's a 600-page thriller-type Vietnam War epic. The "rogue" Colonel is a Conradian figure, but the Vietnmamese and Filipino characters aren't Conradian stereotypes. The "Psy Ops" mission - to use the enemy's own mythology to defeat him -is pure fiction and of course it gets turned around.
The black/white dynamic is pretty much reduced to a fight over the n-word, something which also happens in Man Gone Down. In Oscar Wao, it's used about 40 to 50 times. (See the Amazon.com customer reviewer by a fellow Dominican woman who takes the author to task for it and his reply (in doublespeak, IMO).
Winner, 2007 International Dublin Impac Literary Prize:
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Translated from the Norwegian, a coming of age story about a string of betrayals during wartime. A very simple story, however, finding the moral message is not so easy.
Here's the IMPAC longlist:
http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/2007/Longlist.htm
Thank you for reading.
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Troy
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Troy
Post Number: 1031
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, January 06, 2008 - 04:31 pm: |
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Thanks Steve_s. Also, please do not hesitate to recommend what you percieve as a great book.
Folks here do read books by white authors -- they have been known to write a decent book every now and then  |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 312
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 12, 2008 - 11:46 pm: |
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Thanks, Troy. Following up on the National Book Critics Circle Awards, here are the finalists:
Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone, Free Press
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying, Knopf
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982, Ecco
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso
Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia, Random House
Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Farrar, Straus
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s
Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men. Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter. HarperCollins
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, S. & S.
Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press
Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago
Criticism
Acocella, Joan. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon
Alvarez, Julia. Once Upon a Quniceanera, Viking
Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt
Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus
Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus
Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Sam Anderson -- winner
Finalists:
Brooke Allen
Ron Charles
Walter Kirn
Adam Kirsch
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Emilie Buchwald, writier, editor, and publisher of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis
http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/
Note the stated "goal to represent book culture throughout the nation" and the "theme of inclusiveness." Uh, oh.
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Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 313
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, January 13, 2008 - 12:17 am: |
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Here are the ones I've read:
In autobiography, "Brother I'm Dying" by Edwidge Danticat. I liked it. It's funny that "One Drop" by Bliss Broyard, which I also liked, was not chosen.
In fiction, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Díaz, "In the Country of Men" by Hisham Matar, and "The Shadowcatcher" by Marianne Wiggins. I liked the Matar more than the other two. The author is Libyan.
In biography, "Ralph Ellison" by Arnold Rampersad and "Thomas Hardy" by Claire Tomalin. I'll go with the Tomalin. Her Thomas Hardy is easy to relate to and completely interesting.
In criticism, "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound" by Ben Ratliff. Sorry, it doesn't quite make it, IMO. I've skimmed "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century" by Alex Ross and I already know it's a good book about modern classical music. I also watched an interesting interview with Susan Faludi on Book-TV and her book, "The Terror Dream," deconstructs the mythologies of 9/11, particularly regarding gender.
Have you by any chance read Shelby Steele's book about Barack Obama? I really don't have any problem with it, in fact, I think he's probably right about a lot of things, although I disagree with some of his conclusions. I more or less agree with this critical review by John McWhorter:
http://www.nysun.com/article/67128
I also read "On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with Raymond Obstfeld. Gosh, he sure has read a lot of the literature of the HR, however, I found myself disagreeing with many of his interpretations. Anyway, the middle third of the book is about the Harlem "Rens," a black professional basketball team of the 1920s who competed mostly against white teams like one called the Original Celtics. The first third is devoted to the literature and the final third to the music of the era. Thanks.
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Wfcooper
Regular Poster
Username: Wfcooper
Post Number: 18
Registered: 12-2007
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 - 03:11 pm: |
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THERE'S ALWAYS A REASON UPDATE: CLOSE BUT...
When I saw the email with the NAACP IMAGE AWARD Nominations, my heart skipped a beat. Could it be dreams do come true? Was my first train of thought. But then I read the OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK- FICTION nominations list and...
To lose out to Junot Diaz (what an awesome book!), Walter Mosley, Nuruddin Farah, Zakes Mda and Stephen L. Carter is an honor. And while I am disappointed today, I know that I gave it the best effort I could in telling a very powerful story about God's gift to us all..LOVE. That I have come from sleeping on an office floor because of no home computer and all those damn rejection letters telling me Black Men have no feelings to the brink of an NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINATION (I was a finalist on the MASTERS LIST) is a victory in itself. YOU NEVER GIVE UP ON YOUR DREAMS, BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN.
I can't help but feel motivated to study the craft even harder.
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