MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
Mar 5 – Mar 11, 2012 Edition National Book Critics Award Goes to Edith Pearlman
NEW YORK, NY/AUTHORLINK NEWS/March 9, 2012–The National Book Critics Circle named short story author Edith Pearlman as winner of its big fiction prize March 8 for her book, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories.
The NBCC awards are among the most prestigious literary honors. Last year, Jennifer Egan won the award for A Visit from the Goon Squad before going on to win the Pulitzer.
Book awards, unlike film awards, can be wildly unpredictable and frequently go in favor of the lease-known author. In November, the National Book Award for fiction went to Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones. Binocular Vision , a collection of 34 Chekhov-like short stories, was also shortlisted for the NBA.
Binocular Vision was released last year with little fanfare from Lookout Books, an imprint of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. The publication is the first from Lookout Books and a triumph for Pearlmans distinctive storytelling, bringing it to a larger audience.
Nonfiction went to Maya Jasanoff for Libertys Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf), a book of fresh, original, and sprightly scholarship, by Harvard professor of British history Jasanoff, acknowledging colonists response to Loyalists during the Revolutionary War and the consequences for Britains entire empire thereafter.
The biography award went to John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press), a book that brings alive the remarkable American statesman while also delivering a profound understanding of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th-century.
The poetry award went to Laura Kasischke for Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press), a formally inventive work that speaks to the horrors and delights of ordinary life in an utterly original way.
The autobiography award went to Mira Bartók for The Memory Palace: A Memoir (Free Press), a book that rose to the formal challenge of blending her mothers journals, reflections on her mothers mental illness and subsequent homelessness, and thoughts on her own recovery from a head injury to create a heartfelt yet respectful work of art.
The award for criticism went to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press), celebrating critic par excellence who showed his love of his various subject in tour-de-force language
Kathryn Schulz was presented the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, introduced by Carolyn Kellogg, and Roberts B. Silvers of the New York Review of Books was presented the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, introduced by Steven G. Kellman and Daniel Mendelsohn.
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. It was founded in 1974 to encourage and raise the quality of book criticism in all media and to create a way for critics to communicate with one another about their professional concerns. It consists of about 600 active book reviewers.
