National Book Awards - 2013

  

On November 20th, the winners of the National Book Awards were announced.
After careful consideration,  The Good Lord Bird  by James McBride was chosen as this year's winner for fiction.


James McBride portrays white abolitionist John Brown as "part Crocodile Dundee, part backwoods preacher, part con man" according to Baz Dreisinger in her New York Times Book Review. She also calls McBride himself a "modern-day Mark Twain" with his comic twists and turns threaded with sadness. While a humorous approach to such a serious topic is risky, McBride manages to entertain readers and leave them with his own creative (and potentially controversial) take on historical figures like Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass. 

The Good Lord Bird and the other four finalists below can all be checked out at Glenview Public Library:

The Lowland  by Jhumpa Lahiri (The Lowland was also on the Man Booker Prize shortlist.)

The Flame Throwers  by Rachel Kushner  (Kushner's Telex from Cuba was a National Book Award finalist in 2008.)

Bleeding Edge  by Thomas Pynchon (Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was a National Book Award winner in 1974.)

Tenth of December  by George Saunders (Saunders also won the 2013 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.)


Who were the National Book Award judges?
The judges included three award-winning novelists (Charles Baxter,  Gish Jen and Rene Steinke), a  noted Seattle bookseller/editor (Rick Simonson), and a New York Times writer (Charles McGrath ).

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