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THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS - 2006 |
| Pulitzer Prize |
| Man Booker Prize |
| The National Book Awards |
| The Audie Awards |
| NATIONAL |
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| Since 1950, The National Book Awards have become the nation's preeminent literary prizes, and The National Book Awards Ceremony and Dinner the most important event on our literary calendar. Today, the Awards are given to recognize achievements in four genres: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature. |
| Fiction: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers Cognitive neurologist and well-known writer team up to produce a machine that can pass a comprehensive exam in English literature, with predictably unpredictable results. Like The Gold Bug Variations, this is another of Powers` wild, unforgettable novels encompassing science, philosophy, and the frailty of mankind.After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2-Richard Powers-returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible proj... Read more... |
| Fiction: Only Revolutions: A Novel by Mark Z. Danielewski Mark Danielewski`s first novel House of Leaves is a cult-favorite--experimental horror fiction in a gorgeous (and newly remastered) full-color package. His new book Only Revolutions takes the experiment 10 steps further in a story about teenage lovers Hailey and Sam: the book is printed on two sides--one side tells the story from Hailey`s point of view, flip it over and you get Sam`s side (literally). We caught a glimpse inside the mind-bending new novel--take a look for yourself below. is unlike anything ever conceived before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other. Read more... |
| Fiction: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel by Ken Kalfus Mark Danielewski`s first novel House of Leaves is a cult-favorite--experimental horror fiction in a gorgeous (and newly remastered) full-color package. His new book Only Revolutions takes the experiment 10 steps further in a story about teenage lovers Hailey and Sam: the book is printed on two sides--one side tells the story from Hailey`s point of view, flip it over and you get Sam`s side (literally). We caught a glimpse inside the mind-bending new novel--take a look for yourself below. is unlike anything ever conceived before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other. Read more... |
| Fiction: Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta Mary Whittaker and Bobby DeSoto have constructed lives for themselves like Popsicle-stick houses: brittle, unfurnished, painstakingly assembled but made to be snapped apart or abandoned in a moment. The main characters of Dana Spiotta`s magnificent second novel, Eat the Document, they were once in love, but spend all but a few pages of the book intentionally distant and out of communication--fugitives after executing a political bombing in the `70s that went awry. Moving often, changing their names more than once, they had to cut off any friendship as soon as it blossomed emotionally and seemed to demand authenticity. Now, in the 1990s, Mary`s 15-year-old son Jason (a `70s music buff) begins to uncover his mother`s dangerous secre... Read more... |
| Fiction: The Zero LP by Jess Walter Read more... |
| Nonfiction: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9... by Lawrence Wright National Book Award Finalist is the definitive history of the long road to September 11. Read more... |
| Nonfiction: Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China`s Past ... by Peter Hessler " Read more... |
| Nonfiction: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Ira... by Rajiv Chandrasekaran Read more... |
| Nonfiction: At Canaan`s Edge: America in the King Years 1... by Taylor Branch One of the greatest of American stories has found its great chronicler in Taylor Branch. Beginning with Parting the Waters in 1988, followed 10 years later by Pillar of Fire, and closing now with At Canaan`s Edge, Branch has given the short life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent revolution he led the epic treatment they deserve. The three books of Branch`s America in the King Years trilogy are lyrical and dramatic, social history as much as biography, woven from the ever more complex strands of King`s movement, with portraits of figures like Lyndon Johnson, Bob Moses, J. Edgar Hoover, and Diane Nash as compelling as that of his central character. Read more... |
| Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Thos... by Timothy Egan The dust storms that terrorized America`s High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survivedthose who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon car... Read more... |
| Poetry: Capacity: Poems by James McMichael Capacity, the extraordinary new collection from the award-winning poet James McMichael, deliberates an earth that supplies what people need to live. Ocean, land, animate bodies, shelter, thoughts, feelings, talk, sex--each is addressed at the pace of someone dense with wonder`s resistance to take for granted even the smallest or most obvious parts of existence. |
| Poetry: Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner Read more... |
| Poetry: Chromatic by H. L. Hix H. L. Hix`s newest poetry book, Chromatic, contains three sequences of poems. Each borrows its title: "Remarks on Color" from Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Eighteen Maniacs" from Duke Ellington, and "The Well-Tempered Clavier" from J. S. Bach. Exploiting those predecessors, the poems in Chromatic explore the full range of effects caused by human emotion. Read more... |
| Poetry: Averno: Poems by Louise Gluck Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück’s eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence. Read more... |
| Poetry: Splay Anthem (New Directions Paperbook) by Nathaniel Mackey In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey`s "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories—from America to Andalucía, from Ethiopia to Vienna—in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance., a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Miró painting, Mackey`s poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth`s music, spirit lift. Read more... |
| Young People`s Literature: The Astonishing Life of Octavi... by M.T. Anderson A gothic tale becomes all too shockingly real in this mesmerizing magnum opus by the acclaimed author of FEED.It sounds like a fairy tale. He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the finest of classical educations. Raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother — a princess in exile from a faraway land — are the only persons in their household assigned names. As the boy`s regal mother, Cassiopeia, entertains the house scholars with her beauty and wit, young Octavian begins to question the purpose behind his guardians` fanatical studies. Only after he dares to open a forbidden door does he learn the hideous nature of their experiments — and his own chilling role... Read more... |
| Young People`s Literature: Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt The startling resolution of the novel confirms Martine Leavitt`s reputation as a treasure of a writer, a storyteller who can weave magnificent spells. Leavitt confronts readers with issues and revelations that, while they occur in a setting far from their own experience, bear the intimacy of next door. Read more... |
| Young People`s Literature: Sold by Patricia Mccormick H. L. Hix`s newest poetry book, Chromatic, contains three sequences of poems. Each borrows its title: "Remarks on Color" from Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Eighteen Maniacs" from Duke Ellington, and "The Well-Tempered Clavier" from J. S. Bach. Exploiting those predecessors, the poems in Chromatic explore the full range of effects caused by human emotion. Read more... |
| Young People`s Literature: The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin It all starts when Matthew observes a heroic scene in a convenience store: A man named Murdoch puts himself between an abusive father and his son. Matt is determined to get to know this man. And when, amazingly, Murdoch begins dating Matt`s mother, it seems as if life may become peaceful for the first time. A thought-provoking exploration of self-reliance and the nature of evil and a heart-wrenching portrait of a family in crisis, this is Nancy Werlin`s most compulsively readable novel yet. Read more... |
| Young People`s Literature: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang Indie graphic novelist Gene Yang`s intelligent and emotionally challenging American Born Chinese is made up of three individual plotlines: the determined efforts of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King to shed his humble roots and be revered as a god; the struggles faced by Jin Wang, a lonely Asian American middle school student who would do anything to fit in with his white classmates; and the sitcom plight of Danny, an All-American teen so shamed by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee (a purposefully painful ethnic stereotype) that he is forced to change schools. Each story works well on its own, but Yang engineers a clever convergence of these parallel tales into a powerful climax that destroys the hateful stereotype of Chin-Kee, while leavi... Read more... |