Tonight, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Manhattan, the National Book Awards will be presented at a black-tie ceremony. For anyone unfamiliar with the event, just think of a literary Oscars -- without the TV coverage or popular appeal.
The National Book Awards are one of the United States' most prestigious literary prizes, but in a nation where, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, less than 50% of adults still read even one work of "literature" (defined as any novel, story, play or poem) in a year, that doesn't mean as much as it once did.
For this reason, perhaps, the proceedings have taken on a certain desperation, culminating in an extended dust-up over the five fiction nominees (Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's "Madeleine Is Sleeping," Christine Schutt's "Florida," Joan Silber's "Ideas of Heaven," Lily Tuck's "The News From Paraguay" and Kate Walbert's "Our Kind"), which have been decried by critics, publishers and booksellers as representing far too narrow a slice of literary life.
The National Book Awards are no stranger to controversy; just last year, Yale University English professor Harold Bloom called the decision to honor Stephen King with a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters "egregious," a slap in the face to literature.
This new dispute, however, is somewhat different. No one is saying that the fiction nominees are too commercial, but that they are not commercial enough. Only one, "Our Kind," has sold more than 2,000 copies, which is a paltry figure even for literary fiction, and all five are the sort of slim, interior -- some might say precious -- works that fly under the radar in a blockbuster culture such as ours. Add to this the fact that the five nominated writers are all women and all live in New York City, and you've got a tempest in a teapot, the type of small-stakes squabble at which the book business excels.
Publishing insiders, of course, see the issue differently, in much more consequential terms. To them, this is a matter of survival in a market that seems tenuous at best. The National Book Awards, after all, are considered a showcase; winning, or even receiving a nomination, can translate into thousands of sales. Why not, then, tilt toward more visible works of fiction and, in the process, raise the profile of the industry and the prize?
"We are completely closing ourselves off from the culture at large," Larry Kirschbaum, chairman of Time Warner Book Group, told the New York Times. "We are supporting our demise."
