Tools
Related Navigation
2010 National Book Award Winners and Finalists
The National Book Award recognizes the best of American literature, raising the cultural appreciation of great writing in the country while advancing the careers of both established and emerging writers.
Fiction | Non-Fiction | Poetry | Young People's Literature
Fiction
Fiction Winner
Lord of Misrule
by
Jaimy Gordon
At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts all struggle to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters -- scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain -- through a year and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia.
Horseman Tommy Hansel has a scheme to rescue his failing stable: He'll ship four unknown but ready horses to Indian Mound Downs, run them in cheap claiming races at long odds, and then get out fast before anyone notices. The problem is, at this rundown riverfront half-mile racetrack in the Northern Panhandle, everyone notices--veteran groom Medicine Ed, Kidstuff the blacksmith, old lady "gyp" Deucey Gifford, stall superintendent Suitcase Smithers, eventually even the rulled-off "racetrack financier" Two-Twi and the ominous leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. But no one bothers to factor in Tommy Hansel's go-fer girlfriend, Maggie Koderer. Like the beautiful, used-up, tragic horses she comes to love, Maggie has just enough heart to wire everyone's flagging hopes back to the source of all luck. McPherson & Co.
Fiction Finalists
Parrot and Olivier in America
by Peter Carey
Olivier is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected in the United States by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.
Alfred A. Knopf
Great House
by Nicole Krauss
A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through. For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer's life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.
Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared.
Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?
W.W. Norton & Co.
So Much for That
by Lionel Shriver
"Shep Knacker has long saved for "The Afterlife": an idyllic retreat to the Third World where his nest egg can last forever. Traffic jams on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will be replaced with "talking, thinking, seeing, and being" - and enough sleep. When he sells his home repair business for a cool million dollars, his dream finally seems within reach. Yet Glynis, his wife of twenty-six years, has concocted endless excuses why it's never the right time to go. Weary of working as a peon for the jerk who bought his company, Shep announces he's leaving for a Tanzanian island, with or without her." "Just returned from a doctor's appointment, Glynis has some news of her own: Shep can't go anywhere because she desperately needs his health insurance. But their policy only partially covers the staggering bills for her treatments, and Shep's nest egg for The Afterlife soon cracks under the strain." "Enriched with three medical subplots that also explore the human costs of American health care, So Much for That follows the profound transformation of a marriage, for which grave illness proves an unexpected opportunity for tenderness, renewed intimacy, and dry humor. In defiance of her dark subject matter, Shriver writes a page-turner that presses the question: How much is one life worth?"--BOOK JACKET.
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
I Hotel
by Karen Tei Yamashita,
Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco's Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.
As Karen Yamashita's motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.
Coffee House Press
Non-Fiction
Non-Fiction Winner
Just Kids
by Patti Smith
"It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation." "Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous - the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years." "Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame."--BOOK JACKET.
Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Non-Fiction Finalists
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
by Barbara Demick
Follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years, a chaotic period that saw the rise to power of Kim Jong Il and the devastation of a famine that killed one-fifth of the population, illustrating what it means to live under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.
Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group
Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq
by John W. Dower
""I began researching and writing this study shortly after September 11, 2001, when, comparisons between Al Qaeda's surprise attack and Japan, at Pearl Harbor six decades earlier flooded the media in the United States. Japan and World War II Asia hays draw n my attention as a historian for many scars, and analogies between the new conflict and that old one were provocative in unanticipated ways-increasingly so, as it turned out, as 9-11 spilled into the war of choice in Iraq, and that war and ensuing occupation in turn led to chaos and great suffering in a supposedly liberated land."" ""Extraordinarily illuminating...the most significant work to date on the postwar era in Japan."Í Wall Street Journal"" """Magisterial and beautifully written...[A] richly nuanced book...A pleasure to read."Í New York Times Book Review" ""One senses that Dower set out to write the most important Japan book in a generation (and perhaps more). The uplifting news is that he has succeeded...A masterpiece."The Nation" ""One of the handful of truly important books on the Pacific War... a cautionary tale for all peoples, now and in the future."Í Foreign Affairs" ""May well be the most important study of the Pacific War ever published."Í New Republic" "Over recent decades, John W. Dower, one of America's preeminent historians, has addressed the roots and consequences of war from multiple perspectives. In War Without Mercy (1986), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he described and analyzed the brutality that attended World War II in the Pacific, as seen from both the Japanese and the American sides. Embracing Defeat (1999), winner of numerous honors including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, dealt with Japan's struggle to start over in a shattered land in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, when the defeated country was occupied by the U.S.-led Allied powers." "Turning to an even larger canvas, Dower now examines the cultures of war revealed by four powerful eventsÍ Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and the invasion of Iraq in the name of a war on terror. The list of issues examined and themes explored is wide-ranging: failures of intelligence and imagination, wars of choice and "strategic imbecilities," faith-based secular thinking as well as more overtly holy wars, the targeting of noncombatants, and the almost irresistible logicÍ and allureÍ of mass destruction. Dower's new work also sets the U.S. occupations of Japan and Iraq side by side in strikingly original ways." "One of the most important books of this decade, Cultures of War offers comparative insights into individual and institutional behavior and pathologies that transcend "cultures" in the more traditional sense, and that ultimately go beyond war-making alone."--BOOK JACKET.
W.W. Norton & Co.
Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward
by Justin Spring
Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War
by Megan K. Stack
"Every Man in This Village Is a Liar" is LA Times reporter Megan K. Stack's riveting account of what she saw in the combat zones of the Middle East, in war-torn Afghanistan and Pakistan, and beyond. She relates her initial wild excitement and her slow disillusionment as the cost of violence outweighs the elusive promise of freedom and democracy.
Doubleday
Poetry
Poetry Winner
Lighthead
by Terrance Hayes
"Terrance Hayes's fourth collection portrays the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. It sets what is means to be "light longing for darkness" against what it means to "burn with all the humanity fire strips away." Icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear in poems shaped by wonder and restlessness. Meditations on personal and cultural history intersect in a dazzling series of poems inspired by the pecha kucha, a Japanese presentation format, which Hayes adapts as a way of braiding lyric and narrative impulses. In the pecha kucha poems, as in the whole of this book, Hayes navigates melancholy, irreverence, and the sublime."--BOOK JACKET.
Viking Penguin
Poetry Finalists
The Eternal City
by Kathleen Graber
With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.
Princeton University Press
By the Numbers
by James Richardson
For James Richardson, poetry is serious and speculative play for both intellect and imagination. By the Numbers is striking for its range of line and movement, for its microlyrics, crypto-quatrains, "ten-second essays," and the twist and snap of aphorisms. Drawing from myriad fables--Ovidian, Shakespearean, georgic, and scientific--Richardson makes familiar scenes strange enough to provoke new and startling insights.
Copper Canyon Press
One with Others
by C.D. Wright
Investigative journalism is the poet's realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the Civil Rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories--especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow--with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.
Copper Canyon Press
Ignatz
by Monica Youn
"In Monica Youn's stunningly imaginative series Ignatz, George Herriman's comic-strip villainous mouse, Ignatz, is demoused and, with inexhaustible invention, transformed into an object of passion [...] Youn dips what would otherwise be black comedy into the honey pot of untiring desire: 'O pity us // Ignatz O come to us by moonlight / O arch your speckled body over the earth.' [...] Spare, choice, witty, daring, musical, itself never tiring, Youn's style is more than equal to both the romanticism and the grimness."--Cal Bedient
Four Way Books
Young People's Literature
Young People's Literature Winner
Mockingbird 
by Kathryn Erskine
Ten-year-old Caitlin, who has Asperger's Syndrome, struggles to understand emotions, show empathy, and make friends at school, while at home she seeks closure by working on a project with her father.
Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Young People's Literature Finalists
Ship Breaker
by Paolo Bacigalupi
In a futuristic world, teenaged Nailer scavenges copper wiring from grounded oil tankers for a living, but when he finds a beached clipper ship with a girl in the wreckage, he has to decide if he should strip the ship for its wealth or rescue the girl.
Little, Brown & Co.
Dark Water
by Laura McNeal
Living in a cottage on her uncle's southern California avocado ranch since her parent's messy divorce, fifteen-year-old Pearl Dewitt meets and falls in love with an illegal migrant worker, and is trapped with him when wildfires approach his makeshift forest home.
Alfred A. Knopf
Lockdown
by Walter Dean Myers
Teenage Reese, serving time at a juvenile detention facility, gets a lesson in making it through hard times from an unlikely friend with a harrowing past.
Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
One Crazy Summer
by Rita Williams-Garcia
In the summer of 1968, after traveling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp.
Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Last Updated: December 1, 2010