The National Book Foundation has lined up interviews with four of this year’s five nominees for their fiction prize: Lydia Davis, Joshua Ferris, Denis Johnson, and Jim Shepard. I’m assured that Bret Anthony Johnson will follow that quartet of talks up with a Mischa Berlinski interview fairly soon, after which other interlocutors will handle the nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature nominees.
The question everybody gets asked is, naturally, what they were doing when they found out they won. “The phone call came when I was in my study scrambling to finish some confusingly disparate pieces of writing for a deadline, so my mind was in several places at once,” Davis recalls. “It was Harold Augenbraum calling, and I knew him from his days at the Mercantile Library, so I thought for a moment the call might somehow be about Proust (he founded the Proust Society there) but that didn’t seem quite right, and then he told me the news—I was floored.” Shepard was out the first time the Foundation called, and joked that he was sure they were looking for some other author’s phone number; Ferris thought his agent was just going to tell him how much she loved his latest pages. And Johnson? “I turned on my e-mail and found a number of messages from friends, all headed either ‘National Book Award’ or ‘congratulations!'” he says. “Right away I suspected a mass practical joke. I still do.”