Posts Tagged ‘National Book Award’

The finalists for this year’s Story Prize areThe Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner), We Others by Steven Millhauser (Knopf), and Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books). The Story Prize, which annually honors the top book of short fiction, chose the three finalists from a field of 92 books from 60 different publishers. The judges for this year’s prize are Sherman Alexie, Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman.

The Angel Esmeralda is DeLillo’s first short story collection, the nine stories published between 1979 and 2010. Millhauser’s 21 stories are comprised of 14 previously published stories, and seven new stories. And Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, a National Book Award finalist, has stories dating back to 1976.

The Story Prize was established in 2004. Previous winners include The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard, Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff, and, most recently, Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr. The winner will be announced on March 21 at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City.

Thank you to Publisher’s Weekly for the article.

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Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (W.W. Norton & Co.) by Brad Watson is an Indie Bound-Okra Pick for Winter Spring 2010.  This is his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men.

Family members who act like strangers, and characters who eat dirt, undergo strange transformations, and find themselves drawn mysteriously to bodies of water form the heart of Watson’s accomplished collection, but the latest from this author is much more than the sum of its strange moments. In Vacuum, three boys who are afraid their mother will leave them begin playing with razor blades and jumping off the carport roof. In Carl’s Outside, neglectful parents belatedly realize their son has disappeared. In one of the most eerie pieces, Water Dog Good, a man takes in his ethereal 16-year-old niece, who has been sexually assaulted by her father and brothers. In the title story, a teenager and his pregnant girlfriend’s lives unspool after an encounter with a mysterious couple who may or may not be aliens.

Watson writes in a lucid, unaffected style, drawing the reader into the lives of his troubled characters.  He teaches creative writing at the University of Wyoming, Laramie.  He is also the author of The Heaven of Mercury, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Read globally, but buy from your local independent bookstore and keep more revenue in your community.