Lightning Round

My favorite video from our Best of the National Book Awards-anniversary blog: literary criticism at Twitter Speed!

 

In this video, Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Award renders summary judgment on 15 past winners of the National Book Award for Fiction. Some are well known, some now rather obscure -- captured with the clock ticking.



More videos:
The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
The Stories of John Cheever
Fifteen Books in 15 Seconds

Don't forget to vote for your choice among the six finalists for "Best of the National Book Award for Fiction" at www.nationalbook.org.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

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