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Bayou Lights
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 08:24 pm: | 
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Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" (Scribner)
Edward P. Jones ("The Known World," Amistad/HarperCollins)
Caryl Phillips ("A Distant Shore," Alfred A. Knopf)
Richard Powers ("The Time of Our Singing," Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Tobias Wolff ("Old School," Knopf).
Nonfiction
"The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty" by Carolyn Alexander (Viking)
"Gulag" by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)
"Sons of Mississippi" by Paul Hendrickson (Knopf),
"Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx" by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner)
"Rising Up and Rising Down" by William T. Vollmann (McSweeney's).
Biography and Autobiography
"A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates" by Blake Bailey (Picador)
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage" by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
"Jonathan Edwards" by George Marsden (Yale University Press)
"Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake" by Carol Loeb Schloss (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
"Khrushchev: The Man and His Era" by William Taubman (W. W. Norton).
The poetry nominees are "Blue Hour" by Carolyn Forché (HarperCollins), "What Narcissism Means to Me" by Tony Hoagland (Graywolf), "She Says" by Venus Khoury-Ghata (Graywolf), "Columbarium" by Susan Stewart (University of Chicago Press) and "Granted" by Mary Szybist (Alice James Books). |
Cynnara Collins
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - 10:28 pm: |
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Nothing in the list that I read or know of.
I think we need to start a black book award of merit.
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Bayou Lights
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 05:15 am: |
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The Hurston / Wright Foundation has a great awards ceremony. I believe the nominees for 2003 will be announced in June of this year.
In fiction, I just received "The Known World" and in nonfiction "Random Family" was one of my favorite books of the year.
Bayou |
yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 09:22 am: |
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epj and caryl phillips are both brothers, so that is nice.... |
Thumper
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 11:50 am: |
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Hello All,
I think this year's nominees is a good one. Albeit, I haven't read every one of them. Linda has a review coming up concerning Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore. A gang of us have already read A Known World. Actually, At the Time of our Singning by Richard Powers was just sent to us. It seems that the book is about an interracial couple, who got together during the Civil Rights movement, and their super talnted children. So actually, we are nicely represented. |
Sis E
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 04:29 pm: |
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I've just started "The Known World," which is on the list. I read a review of it by Dr. Trudier Harris-Lopez in the Sept.-Oct. issue of Crisis and though she seems to like the book she has several questions about it. In her first paragraph she writes, "The premise of the book, however, that there were free Blacks who owned slaves in the South, is rooted in fact. It is this rarely explored truth that will draw readers, but to what exactly is unclear."
We shall see. The library only gave me seven days (no renewal) to read it, and it's 388 pages long. Eyes, don't fail me now! |
Katrina Merriwether
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, January 23, 2004 - 08:34 pm: |
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YaaaaayYYYYY!
I don't think we've ever had this many black nominees at one time before, have we?
That's encouraging.
I love Caryl Phillips. He's a lot like Percivil Everett to me (am I misspelling his name?). They both take me on journeys and open my mind to all kinds of things I never thought about.
Bravo gentlemen!
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yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, January 25, 2004 - 02:29 am: |
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Katrina Merriwether:
hmmmm....i don't think Phillips and Everett are alike....Both are academics, ie professors of literature...they share a rigor in the story telling, plot, and craft....but the themes, writing style, and tone are quite different. Phillips is much more concerned with black people than Everett, though Phillips blacks are across the diaspora or africans, and he's able to go beyond( perhaps also deficient) the blackness portrayed by african americans, which gives his writing a different flavor. BTW, Phillips literature in general, and McKNights and Everett, should be read within the context of the thread entitled civil rights books...., you know the one about africa and african american identity.
The interrogation of their books and its relationship to African American identity in fiction would be a great MA Thesis or Dissertation..... |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, January 26, 2004 - 11:54 am: |
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When it comes to Percival Everett, I offer a quote from his book, Erasures:
"Not black enough. No, definitely not black enough" |
yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, January 26, 2004 - 02:43 pm: |
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thats funny.... |
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