Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominees

The Los Angeles Times announced the finalists for its annual Book Prize last night. Where? In New York, of course. Los Angeles always seems to be deferring to the great agent/publishing nucleus on the other side of the country (a very practical move, I know, but also a shame). Below are the nominees for Fiction and First Fiction.

Fiction

• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green: A Novel (Random House)
• Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown)
• Susan Straight, A Million Nightingales (Pantheon Books)
• Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone: A Novel (Little, Brown)
• A.B. Yehoshua, A Woman in Jerusalem [translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin] (Harcourt)

First Fiction

• Tony D’Souza, Whiteman (Harcourt)
• Lisa Fugard, Skinner’s Drift: A Novel (Scribner)
• Jennifer Gilmore, Golden Country: A Novel (Scribner)
• Alice Greenway, White Ghost Girls (Black Cat / Grove/Atlantic)
• Janis Cooke Newman, Mary: A Novel (MacAdam/Cage Publishing)

The nominees for Fiction belong to a completely different strata than the nominees of last year. Last year showcased international power hitters like Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, E.L. Doctorow, Mary Gaitskill, and Nick Hornby. Certainly David Mitchell and Susan Straight have critical acclaim, but overall, I think the choices for this year tend toward lesser known (and lesser purchased) authors. I talked online pharmacies with one of the judges, Gina Nahai, who told me that the judging committee was aiming toward highlighting authors who needed the media and sales attention that a prize can bring.

Which goes to show the benefits (and drawbacks) of rotating the judges for prizes: On one hand, the awards can rotate between well-established artists who certainly deserve awards and lesser known artists who could use the boost in sales. On the other hand, the prize lacks a stable identity – people who use the prize to guide their book buying don’t know what type of books are being chosen year by year, or the criteria for which the books are chosen, or develop a trust relationship with a group of judges whom they know select books that fit their taste. But if given a choice, I think that the benefits of rotating the judges outweigh the drawbacks. It enables a wider selection of fiction to gain attention in the market and helps people diversify their reading material, which is not only the explicit mission of many literary blogs, but a worthy goal for a prize to aim for.