The High and the Mighty: NBA Winners and Oprah's New Book Pick

Most folks think of basketball when they hear NBA, but the acronym also stands for the National Book Award, arguably the most prestigious literary prize in the United States. This year's NBA winners were announced last night in a gala New York ceremony. Denis Johnson's trenchant Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke took the fiction prize, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA won for nonfiction, Robert Hass' Time and Materials won for poetry and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won for young people's literature.

However, the literary champ of the week probably is veteran novelist Ken Follett. For her latest book club pick, Oprah Winfrey selected Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, 973-page opus about the building of an English cathedral in the 12th century. The book's sequel, World Without End, was released a few weeks ago and already is on bestsellers lists.

November 15, 2007

Posted by hplreadingcorner at 1:43 PM

Surprise Booker Prize Winner Announced

Anne Enright's The Gathering, a dark novel about three generations of an Irish family hiding a bitter secret, was the surprise winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction, announced today in London. Most literary observers considered Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip to be the favorites to win the prize, which rewards the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.

October 17, 2007

Posted by hplreadingcorner at 4:22 PM