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Despite what the rest of the country thinks, I know you exist in Las Vegas -- I saw you in Barnes & Noble this weekend.
Lots of writer and celebrities and celebrity writers (including Dave Eggers, Maxine Hong Kingston and Wendy Lesser) met at San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore on Monday to choose the finalists for the annual The National Book Critics Circle awards.
Nominees for fiction:
Vikram Chandra, "Sacred Games"
Junot Diaz, "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao"
Hisham Matar, "In The Country of Men"
Joyce Carol Oates, "The Gravediggers Daughter"
Marianne Wiggins, "The Shadow Catcher"
Nonfiction nominees:
Philip Gura, "American Transcendentalism,"
Daniel Walker Howe, "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848"
Harriet Washington, "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present"
Tim Weiner, "Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA"
Alan Weisman, "The World Without Us"
The awards are handed out in March; the complete list of nominees is here.
Sun reporter Charlotte Hsu tells us that NBCC fiction nominee Joyce Carol Oates (she's also nominated her her autobiographical "The Journals" in a relatively new award category) is appearing for a reading/onstage conversation at 8 p.m., Feb. 23 in the Moyer Student Union Ballroom on the UNLV Campus. It's a presentation of the Black Mountain Institute's Forum on Contemporary Cultures.
( http://blackmountain.unlv.edu/news_and_e... )
The Oates event is free, unticketed and open to the public.
More info at blackmountain.unlv.edu
have you read of those? and can you recommend? i started several new books last year (denis johnson, don delillo), but kept getting sidetracked.
I can unreservedly recommend Junot Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Which will make you want to read his short-story collection "Drown" immediately after it.