“God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” a vigorous attack on religion by Christopher Hitchens, and “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.,” by Tim Weiner, a reporter for The New York Times, both appeared on best-seller lists this year. A from-the-ground-up look at the founding of the United States, “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution” by Woody Holton, joined those two finalists, as did Edwidge Danticat’s wrenching memoir of her family in Haiti, “Brother, I’m Dying,” and Arnold Rampersad’s “Ralph Ellison: A Biography.”
…[T]he fiction finalists included first-time novelists as well as familiar storytellers. The novices — Mischa Berlinski for “Fieldwork,” about a journalist living in Thailand, and Joshua Ferris for “Then We Came to the End,” a comic story about office life — were joined by Lydia Davis for her seventh collection of short stories, “Varieties of Disturbance”; Denis Johnson for “Tree of Smoke,” a tale of espionage in Vietnam; and Jim Shepard for “Like You’d Understand, Anyway,” a group of stories told in the first person.
Follow the link for the poetry and young people’s literature nominees.
NewMexiKen has read the first two of the non-fiction works, but none of the others. How about you?