This year’s National Book Award for fiction was awarded to James McBride for The Good Lord Bird. His novel, narrated by a child follower of John Brown, was praised by the judges for “a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain.” Considered an underdog up against such writers as Jhumpa Lahiri and Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McBride wrote the book “amid personal tragedies” and said: “It was always nice to have somebody whose world I could just fall into and follow him around.” The award for nonfiction went to George Packer for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. The judges cited it for its “account of economic decline that traverses large cities and small towns.” The poetry award went to Mary Szybist for Incarnadine, and Cynthia Kadohata won the young people’s literature award for The Thing About Luck. You can read more about the 64th annual ceremony in this NPR article and in today’s NYT.
Laura