Tuesday, March 17, 2009

And The Winners Are....



The National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books:

The co-winners were Juan Felipe Herrera's Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press) and August Kleinzahler's Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss), who both offered capstone books to important careers—works that were resonant, weighty, and accomplished.

Roberto BolaƱo's monumental 2666 (Farrar, Straus), a tale of love and violence set within the framework of the fictional town of Santa Teresa, Mexico, that's widely regarded as the late author's masterpiece, won the fiction award.

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The general nonfiction award went to Dexter Filkins's The Forever War (Knopf),

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The biography award went to Patrick French's The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul,

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The autobiography award went to Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin),

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The criticism award went to Seth Lerer's Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press),

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The evening ended with a fitting memorial tribute to John Leonard.

Bolds mine.

The list of nominees did include women writers, and women have won various categories in the past. But it's odd to read this list (and even odder to scroll down the videos of the recipients, starting here) and then to muse over the argument that women are so rare among mathematicians and scientists because their talents are verbal and literary. I also suspect that if every single winner had been female people would have talked about that, and I think that the reverse situation is also worth some talk.