Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
Saturday, May 07, 2016
The Sympathizer Won a Pulitzer and an Edgar, and May Herald the Great Literary Convergence
It's the first novel that’s won both a major literary award and a major genre award in the same year.
Last week, the Mystery Writers of America handed out the 2016 Edgar Awards, the most prestigious of the crime-writing awards. Among the winners was The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, named Best First Novel — a win that, while well-deserved, was the opposite of notable, given that his novel has already garnered a host of accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize the week before. And yet, for this exact same reason, his Edgar win is remarkable, even momentous — and likely unprecedented. The Sympathizer — a literary thriller about a Vietnamese double agent who moves to Los Angeles after the Vietnam war — is the first novel (or at least the first I can unearth) that’s won both a major literary award and a major genre award in the same year.
The cross-pollination of “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction has been a hot subject of contention for years in bookish circles, “a lover’s quarrel among literati,” as critics, both online and off, bandy questions like What exactly constitutes a genre book? and Can genre books be truly literary? and Are genre and literary books even comparable ? MORE
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