National Book Award Winners 2015

laxjoe · Nov 18, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/u...ook-award.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award for nonfiction Wednesday night for “Between the World and Me,” a visceral, blunt exploration of his experience of being a black man in America, which was published this summer in the middle of a national dialogue about race relations and inequality.

“Every day you turn on the TV and see some kind of violence being directed at black people,” Mr. Coates said in an emotional acceptance speech. “Over and over and over again. And it keeps happening.”

The fiction award went to Adam Johnson for “Fortune Smiles,” a collection of short stories that deal with natural disasters, technology and politics, and take place in settings ranging from Palo Alto, Calif., to North Korea. The judges called Mr. Johnson “one of the most talented writers of his generation” and called his stories by turns “surprising, wondrous, comic and devastating.”

Mr. Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, dedicated the award to Prince Jones, a college friend of his who was shot to death by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal. “I’m a black man in America. I can’t punish that officer; ‘Between the World and Me’ comes out of that place,” Mr. Coates said. “I can’t secure the safety of my son. I just don’t have that power. But what I do have the power to do is say, ‘You won’t enroll me in this lie. You won’t make me part of it.’ ”

“Between the World and Me,” which was published by Spiegel & Grau, was one of the most celebrated and widely discussed books of the year. The novelist Toni Morrison compared Mr. Coates to James Baldwin.

The National Book Award, which was established in 1950, has gone to some of the country’s most celebrated authors, including William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Flannery O’Connor. Presented by the National Book Foundation, the award was open to American authors who published books between Dec. 1, 2014, and Nov. 30, 2015. The prizes were presented at a black-tie dinner at Cipriani Wall Street, with more than 700 guests.

Along with “Fortune Smiles,” finalists in the fiction category included Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” which follows four ambitious young college friends in New York as one of them grapples with his dark past; Lauren Groff’s novel “Fates and Furies,” which tells the story of a marriage from the husband and wife’s perspectives, revealing the secrets they kept; Karen E. Bender’s short-story collection “Refund;” and Angela Flournoy’s debut novel, “The Turner House,” about multiple generations of a Detroit family.

The award for Young People’s Literature was given to Neal Shusterman’s “Challenger Deep,” a novel about a mentally ill teenager who has dark fantasies about traveling to the deepest point on earth, which was inspired by Mr. Shusterman’s son.

The poet Robin Coste Lewis won for her collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” a meditation on cultural and artistic depictions of the black female figure that juxtaposes autobiographical verses with reflections on cultural stereotypes and art.

The best-selling novelist James Patterson received the Literarian Award, for outstanding service to the literary community, in recognition of his philanthropic efforts to support independent bookstores and promote literacy in public schools. Mr. Patterson, who has sold more than 300 million copies of his books, has donated $2.75 million to school libraries and bookstores.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Patterson joked about his outsider status as a commercial author in elite literary company, calling himself the “Big Mac at Cipriani.” He issued a call for publishers to “innovate more.”

“Let’s all be literarians, whatever the hell that means,” he said. “Let’s try to make sure there’s another generation of readers.”

The novelist Don DeLillo, whose eerily prescient works explore technology, surveillance and terrorism, was given the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for his “diverse body of work that examines the mores of contemporary modern American culture.”

Mr. DeLillo, who won a National Book Award for his novel “White Noise” in 1985, is famously reticent and rarely grants interviews or discusses his work. He will release a new novel, “Zero K,” about a billionaire whose wife has a terminal illness, next May.

He was typically understated in his acceptance speech, and at his request, his remarks were not streamed on videocast. Rather than talking about his work or his evolution as a writer, he spoke reverently about a room where he keeps his collection of old paperbacks, and what those books mean to him.

“When I visit the room, I’m not the writer,” he said. “That’s the guy who lives down the hall. Here I’m not the writer at all, I’m the grateful reader.”
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laxjoe · Dec 15, 2015

So I'm 35% through fortune smiles. It's a collection of shirt stories, but I am loving it so far. I'm listening to the audio book as I'm in the car for 4 hours tonight and will be finishing tonight. Just an FYI

The Blackfish · Dec 16, 2015

laxjoe said: ↑

So I'm 35% through fortune smiles. It's a collection of shirt stories, but I am loving it so far. I'm listening to the audio book as I'm in the car for 4 hours tonight and will be finishing tonight. Just an FYI
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4 hours listening to stories about shirts? I'll pass.

laxjoe · Dec 16, 2015

The Blackfish said: ↑

4 hours listening to stories about shirts? I'll pass.
Click to expand...

but the shirts are really well made. we're talking handmade quality shit here

tmb

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