So the National Book Award is taking a page from the Man Booker Prize by deciding to do a “Best of the National Book Award.”
It’s not much more than a stunt to draw attention to the prize, and of course the winner takes nothing but popular acclaim, but who are we to complain? Contests (especially ones where you can vote!) are awesome.
And as Larry Dark over at The Story Prize blog has noted, four out of the six are short story collections. To be fair, they are the collected stories — the anthologies, not individual books — but still.
One book has a huge lead. Can you guess which one?
- The Stories of John Cheever
- Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
- The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
- Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Pop over to the site and vote to see the answer.
2 comments
Personally, I think it’s a little crazy that that book has such a huge lead. It’s probably the weakest of the bunch. (Seriously, over the Cheever and Faulkner? What the what?)
But I voted for the Pynchon, so….
It does seem a bit odd to have so many short story collections, given the wealth of great novels to come out of America in the twentieth century. But there it is. The competition is effectively between authors rather than books.