National Book Critics Circle

The late Roberto Bolano's "2666" received the fiction prize from the National Book Critics Circle. Other winners Thursday night included Ariel Sabar's "My Father's Paradise" for autobiography, Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War" for general nonfiction and Patrick French's "The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul" for biography. For the first time in the awards' 35-year history, two winners were named for one category: August Kleinzahler's "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" and Juan Felipe Herrera's "Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems" shared the poetry prize.

Reporting from New York -- The National Book Critics Circle gave its 2011 fiction prize to Edith Pearlman, an under-the-radar writer of short stories, at its annual awards ceremony Thursday evening at the New School. Pearlman won for her collection "Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories," published by the small independent press Lookout Books, an imprint of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. "I thought if I won I would faint," Pearlman said as she reached the podium to accept her award.

Hilary Mantel's blockbuster "Wolf Hall" took the top fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle Awards in New York on Thursday night. The novel about Thomas Cromwell, henchman to King Henry VIII, also won Britain's prestigious Man Booker prize and is a bestseller in both the U.K. and the United States. Mantel won over Southern California favorite Michelle Huneven, nominated for her novel "Blame." Another California writer, William T. Vollmann, also fell short of taking the prize; he was a finalist in the nonfiction category for "Imperial," his book about the state's border county.

Jennifer Egan was not built for the spotlight. "When I was a teenager, one of my sources of angst was that I felt like I was not an actor, I was always a spectator," she said by phone from New York. "Later, I realized that that's just who I am. That's actually my job. " Lately, Egan has been much more than a spectator in her own life. Her novel "A Visit From the Goon Squad," a fractured narrative about time and connection that stretches from 1970s punk rock San Francisco to a futuristic desert home, was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Reporting from New York -- The National Book Critics Circle gave its 2011 fiction prize to Edith Pearlman, an under-the-radar writer of short stories, at its annual awards ceremony Thursday evening at the New School. Pearlman won for her collection "Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories," published by the small independent press Lookout Books, an imprint of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. "I thought if I won I would faint," Pearlman said as she reached the podium to accept her award.

Jennifer Egan was not built for the spotlight. "When I was a teenager, one of my sources of angst was that I felt like I was not an actor, I was always a spectator," she said by phone from New York. "Later, I realized that that's just who I am. That's actually my job. " Lately, Egan has been much more than a spectator in her own life. Her novel "A Visit From the Goon Squad," a fractured narrative about time and connection that stretches from 1970s punk rock San Francisco to a futuristic desert home, was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Hilary Mantel's blockbuster "Wolf Hall" took the top fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle Awards in New York on Thursday night. The novel about Thomas Cromwell, henchman to King Henry VIII, also won Britain's prestigious Man Booker prize and is a bestseller in both the U.K. and the United States. Mantel won over Southern California favorite Michelle Huneven, nominated for her novel "Blame." Another California writer, William T. Vollmann, also fell short of taking the prize; he was a finalist in the nonfiction category for "Imperial," his book about the state's border county.

John Freeman, a longtime book critic who recently became the editor of the literary magazine Granta, has written a new book called "The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox" (Simon & Schuster: 256 pp., $25). He's conceived of the subject in the broadest possible terms: He begins with an ancient Sumerian love poem, tracks the history of communication from the Persian Empire in the 6th century, the Arabian use of pigeons, the growth of literacy, the golden age of letter-writing in 19th century Europe, up to the telegraph, ZIP Codes and development of computers.

For much of their lives, Yona Sabar and his son Ariel were like warring countries with radically different customs, languages and concerns. In those days, Ariel was, he says, "a very bratty, 1980s L.A. kid" who "bought into many of the superficial values of that era." His father, a professor of Aramaic at UCLA since 1972, was a Jewish immigrant from Kurdish Iraq, a gentle, modest man grounded in Old World courtesies and academic formalities. "Ours was a clash of civilizations," Ariel writes in his memoir "My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past," which won a 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and has just been reissued in paperback.

The late Roberto Bolano's "2666" received the fiction prize from the National Book Critics Circle. Other winners Thursday night included Ariel Sabar's "My Father's Paradise" for autobiography, Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War" for general nonfiction and Patrick French's "The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul" for biography. For the first time in the awards' 35-year history, two winners were named for one category: August Kleinzahler's "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" and Juan Felipe Herrera's "Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems" shared the poetry prize.

Junot Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" was named the year's best work of fiction, and Edwidge Danticat's memoir "Brother, I'm Dying" won as best nonfiction work in a poll of more than 100 authors and critics conducted by the National Book Critics Circle. Among the writers who participated were John Updike, Anne Tyler, Walter Isaacson, Jane Smiley, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Lethem and Sue Miller.