National Book Award: Winners, Finalists, and Longlisted Titles
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The mission of the National Book Foundation is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America. National Book Awards are given in five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.
Here we highlight the winners of African descent. The first African-American writer to win a National Book Award was Ralph Ellison, in 1953, for Invisible Man.
2 Books Honored by the National Book Foundation in 1998
Finalist – Fiction
The Healing
by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 1999)
Fiction, Paperback, 304 pages
ISBN: 9780807063255Publisher: Beacon Press
Book Description:
Gayl Jones s special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant, The New Republic
Gayl Jones s first novel, Corregidora, won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping, subtle, and sure. It was praised, along with her second novel, Eva s Man, by writers and critics from all over the nation: John Updike, Maya Angelou, John Edgar Wideman, and James Baldwin, to name a few. The publication of The Healing, her first novel in over twenty years, is a literary event.
Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer, traveling by bus to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds and bodies. But before that she was a minor rock star s manager, and before that a beautician. She s had a fling with her rock star s ex-husband and an Afro-German horse dealer; along the way she s somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman in Africa. Harlan tells her story from the end backwards, drawing us constantly deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her tale-the story of her first healing.
The Healing is a lyrical and at times humorous exploration of the struggle to let go of pain, anger, and even love. Slipping seamlessly back through Harlan s memories in a language rich with the textured cadences of the black Southerner, Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic-and unexpected-beginning.
Gayl Jones s special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant, The New Republic
Gayl Jones s first novel, Corregidora, won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping, subtle, and sure. It was praised, along with her second novel, Eva s Man, by writers and critics from all over the nation: John Updike, Maya Angelou, John Edgar Wideman, and James Baldwin, to name a few. The publication of The Healing, her first novel in over twenty years, is a literary event.
Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer, traveling by bus to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds and bodies. But before that she was a minor rock star s manager, and before that a beautician. She s had a fling with her rock star s ex-husband and an Afro-German horse dealer; along the way she s somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman in Africa. Harlan tells her story from the end backwards, drawing us constantly deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her tale-the story of her first healing.
The Healing is a lyrical and at times humorous exploration of the struggle to let go of pain, anger, and even love. Slipping seamlessly back through Harlan s memories in a language rich with the textured cadences of the black Southerner, Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic-and unexpected-beginning.
Finalist – Poetry
From The Devotions: Poems
List Price: $12.95
Beacon Press (Jan 01, 1999)
Fiction, Paperback, 304 pages
ISBN: 9781555972639Publisher: Beacon Press
Book Description:
With From the Devotions, Carl Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul ever restless come explosively together. Speaking to a balance between decorum and pain, he offers here a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or the organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage nor saint nor prophet, the poet is the listener, the mourner, the one who has some access to the maddening quarters of human consciousness, the wry Sibyl. From the Devotions is deeply felt, highly intelligent, and unsentimental, and cements Phillips s reputation as a poet of enormous talent and depth.
With From the Devotions, Carl Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul ever restless come explosively together. Speaking to a balance between decorum and pain, he offers here a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or the organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage nor saint nor prophet, the poet is the listener, the mourner, the one who has some access to the maddening quarters of human consciousness, the wry Sibyl. From the Devotions is deeply felt, highly intelligent, and unsentimental, and cements Phillips s reputation as a poet of enormous talent and depth.