http://www.bookcritics.org/2003Finalists.htmFiction
Monica Ali, Brick Lane (Scribner)
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (Amistad/HarperCollins)
Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (Knopf)
Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Tobias Wolff, Old School (Knopf)
General Nonfiction
Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (Viking)
Anne Applebaum, Gulag (Doubleday)
Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi (Knopf)
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Scribner)
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeney’s)
Biography/Autobiography
Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador)
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards (Yale University Press)
Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Norton)
Poetry
Carolyn Forche, Blue Hour (HarperCollins)
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means To Me (Graywolf)
Venus Khoury-Ghata, She Says (Graywolf)
Susan Stewart, Columbarium (University of Chicago Press)
Mary Szybist, Granted (Alice James Books)
Criticism
Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos (Grove)
Nick Hornby, Songbook (McSweeney’s)
Ross King, Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling (Walker)
Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking)
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
― jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 23:43 (twenty-two years ago)
I'm a little annoyed at the Vollmann and Hornby citations. Which has nothing to do with the fact that they're both from McSweeney's -- but it just seems that they represent a certain lazy, predictable thinking when it comes to these things. A 3,000-page book on the history of violence and ethics? Do you think anyone actually read the thing, or did they just feel obligated to nominate it because, well, it's obviously brilliant and profound, right? And then I fear that Hornby's fame and reputation as a novelist is clouding people's judgment -- I do like the premise of
Songbook (I haven't read it yet), as I'm interested in "personal" criticism, but I just can't believe it was all that
good. At this point, Sontag almost seems kneejerk, too (like Meryl Streep), but I don't remember how that book was received.
― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 18:11 (twenty-two years ago)