2008 National Book Awards
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The National Book Award winners were announced last night at a Gala Dinner in New York City. Here they are [please note all text is directly from the National Book Award website]: 
FICTION
WINNER: Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Shadow Country is an epic of American rise and descent—poetic, mythic, devastating. From his Everglades trilogy Peter Matthiessen has coaxed a masterpiece, a wrenching story of familial, racial and environmental degradation stretching from the Civil War to the Great Depression. His E.J. Watson emerges through a dazzling array of voices as a singular figure in our national literature, the looming personification of manifest destiny within the dark reaches of our history.Finalists:
- Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
- Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
- Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)
NON-FICTIONWINNER: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
In the mesmerizing narrative of Annette Gordon-Reed’s American family saga, one feels the steady accretion of convincing argument: Her book is at once a painstaking history of slavery, an unflinching gaze at the ways it has defined us, and a humane exploration of lives—grand and humble—that “our peculiar institution” conjoined. This is more than the story of Thomas Jefferson and his house slave Sally Hemings; it is a deeply moral and keenly intelligent probe of the harsh yet all-too-human world they inhabited and the bloodline they share.Finalists:
- Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
- Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (The Penguin Press)
- Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)
POETRYWINNER: Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis. In this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master.Finalists:
- Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
- Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
- Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)
YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
WINNER: Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
A soldier with a hidden past, a mysterious death at an empty hotel, a femme fatale manipulating a man for her own purposes—this novel has all the hallmarks of a classic noir, but Judy Blundell shifts these tropes into the equally elusive and shady realm of adolescence. A young girl moves from innocence to desire, from prejudice to justice and from the tumultuous bonds of family into a sad, enduring wisdom.Finalists:
- Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
- Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
- E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
- Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)
Posted bymonnibo at 8:20 PM
Tags: Award Winners
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Interesting that the Hemmings book hasn't been promoted more heavily here. I would have thought (seriously!) the local news would have led off with the award!