When the National Book Awards shortlists were announced last month, we wondered about Shadow Country, the “remix” of three earlier novels by Peter Matthiessen into a single unified work of fiction. Specifically, we asked, as a philosophical exercise more than anything else, about the amount of revision on the previously published material that would qualify a book like Shadow Country as a new work.
NY Times reporter Charles McGrath ran the question further down the field, as National Book Foundation director Harold Augenbraum says that there was no controversy about considering the book for the fiction award, which will be decided next week: “It was as much a head-scratcher as anything else,” says Augenbraum, noting that collections of short stories, essays, and poems are routinely submitted for consideration. “We don’t allow reprints, but we didn’t consider this a reprint. There’s a lot of new writing here.”
From there, the piece is basically a welcome profile of Matthiessen, who comments of his nominated work, “There’s hardly a sentence in the whole damn thing that’s exactly the same.”