Independents Triumph At National Book Awards

PublishersLunch

The National Book Awards turned into a celebration of independence of sorts on Wednesday night, with independent publishers issuing three of the four medal winners, and a special award for service to the American literary community going to independent bookseller and former ABA president Mitchell Kaplan from Miami’s Books & Books.

In a similar but different vein, the AP called the evening’s festivities “a gilded tribute to the 99 percent. Stories of resilience in the face of poverty, displacement and disappearance were awarded Wednesday night as hundreds of writers, editors, publishers and other industry officials gathered under the 70-foot ceilings of the luxury venue” blocks away from Zuccotti Park. (As poet Ann Lauterbach said in introducing honoree John Ashbery, "I thought I should point out, since no one else has, that we are occupying Wall Street.")

The winners, as you probably know already, were:

Fiction:

Jesmyn Ward, SALVAGE THE BONES (Bloomsbury)

Nonfiction:
Stephen Greenblatt, THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN (Norton)

Young People's Literature:
Thanhha Lai, INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN (HarperCollins Children's)

Poetry:
Nikky Finney, HEAD OFF & SPLIT (Triquarterly)

Complete video of the acceptance speeches is archived here, with Mitch Kaplan and John Ashberry's speeches archived here. Collectively the winners were little-known in the marketplace, with Greenblatt's book having outsold the other three titles in print by a factor of about five to one (and all four winners combined are well shy of the sales totals recorded by the most popular nominees).

Though Ward's book was only lightly reviewed, after its nomination, the Washington Post's Ron Charles wrote, "Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife is an odds-on favorite for the National Book Award, partly because it's the only well-known novel among the finalists, but Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it." Bloomsbury said Thursday morning they are reprinting at least 25,000 copies of SALVAGE THE BONES. (They released the book last month in the UK as well. Agate published Ward's first novel, WHERE THE LINE BLEEDS, also set in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, in 2008, and that title is likely to see renewed interest as well.)

In introducing Kaplan to accept his honorary award, author Walter Mosley said: "Mitchell Kaplan is our hero not because he is a success but because he has survived and brought with him hope and a blueprint." Kaplan reinforced that optimism and said "our challenge today is to figure out how to solve the complex distribution issues that have developed because of the changing world we now operate in. We need to reassert the role of the bookseller.... We need to recognize and honor the place of the bookseller in the publishing process."

And in introducing the Young People's category, chair Marc Aronson danced around the controversy involving the mistaken announcement (and subsequent removal) of Lauren Myracle's SHINE by alluding to "oral malfunctions" and making jokes about a faulty phone line that also cost the St. Louis Cardinals Game 5 in the World Series. 

And Julie Bosman reports in The New York Times:

National Book Awards Go to ‘Salvage the Bones’ and ‘Swerve’