A Good Book Wasn't Hard to Find

Last night, at the 60th National Book Awards Ceremony and Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, the winner of the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction -- chosen by the more than 10,000 readers who voted on the National Book Foundation's website -- was announced: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor. Here's a video of the conversation about O'Connor I had a couple of months back with foundation president, Harold Augenbraum.

 

Colum McCann won the 2009 NBA Fiction Award. Read former judge Tom LeClair on all the nominees here.

 

Other winners included:

NONFICTION: T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Life of Cornelius J. Vanderbilt.

POETRY: Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies.

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE: Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

 

-JAMES MUSTICH

May 23: Girolamo Savonarola was hanged on this day in 1498 and then incinerated in the same piazza in which the citizens of Florence had earlier attended more than one "bonfire of the vanities." George Eliot's 1863 novel Romola,

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