News - Books

Nominees for the seventh annual Firecracker Alternative Book (FAB) Awards, have been announced. The awards honor the best in alternative publishing in such categories as Sex, Drugs, Music, Graphic Novel, and Zine in addition to the traditional categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poety. The deadline for votes is April 20, and awards will be presented at BookExpo America on May 3 in New York City. Among this year’s nominees are: FICTION

On March 20, at a ceremony held at the New York Public Library, author Colson Whitehead was honored with the Young Lions Fiction Award [YLFA] for his novel John Henry Days (Doubleday). Established in 2001, YLFA awards a $10,000 prize to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories. Remarkably, this year, all the nominees for YLFA were also Book Sense 76 picks. John Henry Days was a July/August Book Sense 76 pick.

Nominees were announced, on March 14, for the 2002 James Beard Foundation Awards, now in their 12th year. The announcement was made at a reception held at the historic James Beard House in Greenwich Village, New York.

"I do everything late in life," said 55-year-old Kurt Corriher, author of the debut thriller Someone to Kill (Forge). "I have my children late in life -- I have a son who’s nine, and a daughter who’s 13 -- and I publish a novel late in life."

Finalists for the Book Sense Book of the Year were announced on February 13. Detailed below are the finalists in the two Children's categories -- Children’s Literature and Children’s Illustrated.

In a March 11 ceremony, held at the Tishman Auditorium at New York University Law School in New York, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced the winners of its annual book awards. The fiction prize was awarded posthumously to W.G. Sebald for Austerlitz (Random House). Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001. His agent, Andrew Wylie, accepted the award.

George P. Pelecanos, the crime-fiction author whose Hell to Pay (Little, Brown) is a Book Sense 76 pick for March/April, started laying the groundwork for a writing career when he was still a youngster -- although he didn't know it then.

In its quest to "Bring the Past Alive," the History Channel is offering a number of documentaries based on outstanding books of nonfiction.

A three-year-old girl falls off a second-floor balcony, lands on her head and breaks her skull. Three days later, she's playing in the snow, fully recovered -- an astounding medical success. But what if this accident had occurred in a remote village in the Indian Himalayas with an American woman doctor performing the surgery for the first time while carefully consulting the medical textbook open in front of her? In this experience, you not only have a chapter from Craig Joseph Danner's self-published novel, Himalayan Dhaba, but also a page from his life.

The 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists were announced on Friday, March 2. Established in 1980, the Times’s annual Book Prize rewards excellence in English-language writing in nine different categories, ranging from biography to fiction to history to poetry. And, notably, several Book Sense 76 picks are among in the list of 45 finalists (including three of the five titles in the first fiction category).