This year’s National Book Critics Circle award winners:
- Fiction: Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar)
- Nonfiction: Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking)
- Biography/Autobiography: Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf)
- Poetry: Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins (Norton)
- Criticism: Patrick Neate, Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet (Riverhead)
The Plain Dealer‘s report of the proceedings also includes descriptions of the events leading up to the announcements. Sixteen of the 25 finalists, including “the sweatshirt-clad” Neate and “the frail, deeply accomplished” Rich, read from their books at the New School Thursday evening. Friday morning, about 50 NBCC members convened for the panel “Ax-grinders, Score-settlers and Pattycake: The Politics of Reviewing, and the Reviewing of Politics.”
According to The Plain Dealer, Sam Tanenhaus argued that “editors make a mistake striving for ‘a false objectivity and neutrality that readers can see through.'” Dennis Loy Johnson, publisher of Melville House Publishing and proprieter of mobylives.com, “took a different slant” and called objective book reviews “a good thing.” Johnson conitnued, “I still think reviewing is news reporting to some extent.”
Johnson also noted that, despite “the shrinking space dedicated to book reviews in newspapers and magazines” (The Plain Dealer‘s phrasing), the blogosphere was not ready for primetime.
“At the moment, the writing is not up to snuff,” he said. “The blogosphere is still driven by young men just out of an MFA program and they’ve still got a lot of issues to work out.”
As the laughter died down, Tanenhaus added, “Some of those issues never get worked out.”
Blogcritics.org also reported on the panel discussion, noting that “the key issue” under discussion “was whether book reviews are ideologically driven.”
The conclusion was they are, and that may be OK. Occasionally obscuring the discourse: the preening and stroking by the panelists, particularly [Rick] Perlstein, who spent much of his opening statement telling Tanenhaus how wonderfully he has modernized the Times Book Review. Tanenhaus broadened the field by praising Steve Wasserman, the highly tailored editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, for raising the reviewing bar.