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National Book Award dust-up continues

The shortlist for this year’s National Book Award for fiction is continuing to generate debate about the worthiness of the nominees and, ultimately, of the award itself. None of the shortlisted authors are well known, even in the literary community, and many American book commentators were left wondering why such big names as Philip Roth and Russell Banks were not nominated. (Novelist Thomas McGuane went so far as to say that the award “was tanking.”) Laura Miller has now weighed in on the debate with a thoughtful editorial in The New York Times. Miller commends the judges for not allowing the award to degenerate into a literary popularity contest, but is put off by the sameness of the shortlisted titles: “Beautiful sentences, formal experiments and infinitely delicate evocations of emotional states abound in these five books, but those woebegone souls in search of a good story will have to keep looking, elsewhere.”

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Read Laura Miller’s editorial in The New York Times

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