We regret to inform you…

…that your host is a dope. Apparently I got my days mixed up and the National Book Awards will be announced tonight not last night. So sorry, this is what I get for reading McNews. On this theme here’s a few links regarding the awards including a nice profile of Distinguished Contribution medal winner Judy Blume (thanks to Laura Lippman for the heads up). A good many more can be found at Maud Newtons site.

Judy Blume seems like an interesting choice in light of the controversy over Stephen King’s award and speech last year. While the fiction nominees tend toward the extremely obscure this year, the keynote award is given to another “big” writer. Is Blume kind of a literary compromise? Even though she has had huge commercial success, she still has a dash of critical respectability and her adult novels have been book club picks and what not. What do you all think of the choice? I was never allowed to read her books as a kid growing up in a Baptist school. By the time I moved to a public high school I was fully entrenched in crime and suspense was too busy sneaking Stephen King books into the house to worry about Judy Blume. Did I miss anything?

Also I previously linked to an interview with James Lee Burke that said he was nominated for a National Book Award and  Pulitzer Prize. Well I checked the nomination lists for both of those awards and the novel in question IN THE MOON OF RED PONIES doesn’t appear on either of them. I think this may be another case in the increasing confusion between being “submitted” for a Pulitzer or National Book Award and being “nominated” for said award.

A publisher is only allowed so many “submissions” for a major award so being picked is certainly good news for the author, but from all of the books “submitted,” which could number in the hundreds, a final “nomination list is picked usually containing three to five titles. I know this was the case a year or so ago with Carolyn Hart’s novel LETTER FROM HOME. The book was submitted by the publisher for the Pulitzer Prize but several people I heard said it was nominated for the Pulitzer. Not anyone’s fault persay but confusing none-the-less. Another related example is Stephen Hunter’s latest novel HAVANA. The cover of the book reads “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” Well HAVANA wasn’t the winner or the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Stephen Hunter was the winner of a Pulitzer for journalism years ago. In my mind, that’s unfair marketing.

As far as I know, the only two “popular” novels to get serious Pulitzer attention are Loren Estleman’s BLOODY SEASON which was nominated in 1988 and LONESOME DOVE which actually won in 1986; both novels were westerns.