There is the Oscar, a bald naked man holding a sword. And the Emmy, a winged woman holding an atom. And then there’s the Edgar, a ceramic bust of Edgar Allen Poe and probably the ugliest award on the planet.

I mention this because the statuette’s unattractiveness (not Poe himself) was a major theme at last night’s 61st Annual  Edgar Awards, held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.  It started at Table 44 where I was honored to be sitting with such noted mystery authors as Julia Spencer-Fleming (All Mortal Flesh), Marshall Karp (The Rabbit Factory), and Jonathon King (Eye of Vengence and the forthcoming Acts of Nature, to be reviewed in our May 15 issue). Noting that each seat at the table had an Edgar Allan Poe Noddler or bobblehead, King and I discussed how these were so much more attractive than the real award.

And then King told me when he won his Edgar Award in 2003 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, his then-ten-year-old daughter offered to repaint the statuette to make it prettier.

It went downhill from there. One presenter advised winners to enjoy their ugly awards, and then when the winner of the Best First Novel by American Author was about to be announced, one of the statuettes broke in half. Was it due to the malevolent presence of Grand Master Stephen King, as one waggish presenter suggested, or did the Edgar, as another presenter noted, finally realize how ugly he was and broke in two? Whatever the cause, the winner Alex Berenson (The Faithful Spy) good-naturedly clutched both pieces of the Edgar in his hands as he thanked his editors and Random House for booking his hotel in Boston where he met his current girlfriend while on his book tour..

Moderated by Today show weatherman Al Roker, the ceremony moved quickly, ending at a surprisingly early 9:45 pm. The night’s biggest surprise was Jason Goodwin winning the Best Novel Award for The Janissary Tree. Goodwin could not be present to accept his award as his publisher had been too cheap to pay for his airplane ticket to fly over from England, an act publisher Sarah Crichton said she “deeply, deeply regrets” as she accepted the award. Crichton was refreshingly honest as she told the audience that she hadn’t expected Goodwin’s tale of a eunuch detective in 1830s Istanbul to win.

Other winners included Naomi Hirahara (Snakeskin Shamisen) for Best Paperback Original, James L. Swanson (Manhunt; The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer) for Best Fact Crime, and E.J. Wagner (The Science of Sherlock HOlmes) for Best Critical/Biographical. Interestingly, the winners for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay were the writers for Season 4 of HBO’s series The Wire, and these included some of the finest crime fiction authors working today: Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and Richard Price.

The highlight of the evening was the recognition of Stephen King as a Mystery Grand Master. After an amusing introduction by Dave Barry and  Ridley Pearson, as well as an inadvertently almost forgotten Donald Westlake,  KIng told the audience that he never called himself a horror writer and that the first three adult books he checked out from the local bookmobile that came through his Maine hometown were crime novels by Richard Stark, Ed McBain, and John D. McDonald. “These books changed my life,” King said, explaining that  they opened up his mind to what he could write about. “The reason why mystery and suspense are the most important genres today,” he said,” is because they mimic life. How we enter and leave life is a mystery.”  King ended his brief defense of genre fiction, stating firmly, “anyone who says this isn’t mainstream fiction is full of bullshit.”

April 22 is Earth Day. Appropriately enough the Santa Monica Public Library and the City of Santa Monica’s Environmental Programs Division is sponsoring a new literary award that aims to ”commend authors, illustrators, and publishers who produce quality books for adults and young people that make significant contributions to, support the ideas of, and broaden public awareness of sustainability”. The Green Prize for Sustainable Literature will be awarded in September 2007 in the categories of adult fiction, adult nonfiction, youth fiction and  youth nonfiction.

Books published in the United States during the 2006 calendar year are eligible for the prize but publishers must hurry to submit their candidates as the deadline is April 30! And this means you, Abrams publicists! One book that sprang immediately to mind as an excellent candidate in the nonfiction adult category is Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21 Century (Abrams, 2006).

Edited by environmentalist  Alex Stephens of the popular blog worldchanging.com, ”this beautifully designed volume (which comes with its own slipcover)”, as LJ reviewer editor Irwin Weintraub raved in a LJ Xpress review last December, “collects ideas and workable solutions from more than 60 contributors that demonstrate the human potential to create a better future and a sustainable planet.” 

While this volume meets the the prize’s basic sustainability criteria (future and long-term oriented, awareness of ecological and resource limitations, regional and global in scope,etc.), the sponsors of this award  strangely forgot to include sustainable requirements for the nominees’ physical production, such as  requesting that a certain percentage of the submitted title  be printed on recycled paper or on paper that comes from environmentally managed forests (see “Harry Potter Goes Green”). Fortunately, Worldchanging is ahead of the game, having been printed on environmentally friendly  New Leaf Paper. And the publisher went one step further by purchasing wind power credits equivalent to the amount of electricity used to produce the book.

I don’t know about you librarians out there, but (and publishers are going to hate me) I suffer from “why buy the cow if the milk is free” syndrome. Surrounded by books and receiving hundreds of galleys every week, I am rarely motivated to actually buy a book. (And forget about giving books as presents. My friends have finally caught on, so a lavishly illustrated art  book from me—usually pilfered from our discarded books cart—doesn’t count as a real gift.) 

So when I want to read a book and I don’t have the galley, I turn to trusty LEO, the New York Public Library’s online catalog, to see if the library has a copy of a particular title and to place a hold on it. I was so inspired by the speeches made at last week’s NBCC awards ceremony I decide to check out some of the winners. Getting a copy of Julie Philip’s James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon was a piece of cake. There were 23 copies available in the NYPL’s branch system and three copies had been put on hold. I noticed one copy was available at the Donnell Library Branch, across the street from the Modern Museum of Art, and since I was going to a screening at MOMA, I could easily pick up that copy.

The NYPL owned only six copies of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, of which two copies appeared to be lost or stolen. There were also two holds, and I added my name to the list, making for a grand total of three holds.

The NYPL must have had high circulating hopes for Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution because it had ordered 86 copies for its branches. Unfortunately, no one had rushed to place a hold (sorry, Simon) and I was not in the mood to read his history. On the other hand, the library obviously had not ordered enough copies of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost : A Search for Six of Six Million (56 copies, 125 holds) and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (101 copies, 381 (wow!) holds, thanks to the Booker Award, perhaps?)

I figured that Mendelsohn’s and Desai’s books would be out in paperback by the time my name got to the top of the holds list, so I decided to try my luck with the poetry winner, Tom Jollimore’s Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Not a single copy to be found in any branch. Oh, I thought, surely those Williamsburg hipsters and bohemians would have demanded a copy for their branch in the Brooklyn Public Library system. Nada. Or perhaps the multicultural Queens Borough Library had been bold enough to order a copy. No results found, said my query search. 

I suspect in this case the libraries didn’t order Jollimore’s book, not out of a disdain for poetry, but because it had not been widely reviewed. As far as I can tell, Library Journal never even received an advance galley for review. One hopes that the NBCC award  will encourage NYPL and other area libraries to buy at least one copy for their poetry-loving patrons. Remember April is National Poetry Month! 

In my case, I am going to buy the book. Unfortunately  my local independent bookseller doesn’t carry it, so thank goodness for Amazon, which makes the long tail possible.    

Yesterday on a bitterly cold evening, I walked from my office on East 25th Street down to the New School in Greenwich Village to hear 24 of the 30 finalists for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Awards read brief excerpts from their nominated works. Since my job limits my precious reading time to the categories I assign (popular and genre fiction; natural history and sciences), I was curious to hear from the authors of the nominated autobiographies, works of criticism, biographies, literary novels, poetry collections, and general nonfiction.

I was not disappointed. I felt like a kid in a Baskin-Robbins store, sampling its 31 ice cream flavors from classic vanilla to yummy pistachio almond. Each author reflected his or her own unique reading and writing style. Comics artist Alison Bechdel displayed panels from her poignant graphic novel memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic as she narrated the story. Flaubert biographer Frederick Brown’s mellifluous voice and perfect French accent conjured up the rainy, muddy funeral of Flaubert’s dear friend, novelist George Sand. Novelist Dave Eggers introduced the real-life hero of his heartbreaking What is the What, Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, who movingly read the book’s final paragraph. And poet Daisy Fried, with two-month-old Quinn strapped to her chest (how’s that for a captive audience?) revealed her gritty, streetwise view of life in My Brother is Getting Arrested Again.  

For those who missed the reading or don’t live in New York City, all is not lost. BookTV on C-Span 2 plans to air the reading on Sunday March 11 at 7pm and Monday March 12 at 12am. For readers interested in learning more about the nominees, the NBCC blog Critical Mass is running an interesting series, “30 Books in 30 Days”, that profiles the authors and their books. The winners will be announced tonight in a ceremony at the New School.

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) has announced its long list of nominees for the 2007 SIBA Book Award.Twenty-six novels, 24 nonfiction titles, 19 children’s books, 12 cookbooks, and six volumes of poetry made it past the first round of voting; following a selection of the finalists, the winners will be announced in June. 

To be eligible for nomination, a book has to have been published in 2006 and be about the South or written by a Southerner. Hence the fiction list has an interesting mix of the usual Southern suspects (Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill, Howard Bahr’s The Judas Field, Mark Childress’s One Mississippi) and some surprising picks (The Templar Legacy by South Carolina’s Steve Berry and The Collectors—well, David Baldacci is from Virginia, and the book is set in the nation’s capital, which at its core is very much a Southern city). But the novel  that should win just for the title alone is Mark Schweitzer’s comic liturgical mystery The Soprano Wore Falsettos, set in North Carolina.

On the nonfiction front, nominees included three regional reference works, The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, The Encyclopedia of North Carolina and South Carolina Encyclopedia, as well as Erik Reece’s compelling Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness (which was also picked as one of LJ’s Best Books of 2006), and the intriguing (to this oenophile) Thomas Jefferson on Wine by John Hailman. (Who knew the Founding Father was the Robert Parker of his day?)

For a complete listing of nominees, see Authors ‘Round the South (authorsroundthesouth.com), the SIBA-sponsored website to promote author appearances at independent bookstores in the South.

The literary awards season continued as the National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization of more than 700 book reviewers, announced its  finalists for the 33rd annual NBCC awards. For the third year, the announcements were made January 20 at a festive Soho gathering graciously hosted by Housing Works Used Books Cafe. The first year I attended there was a raging blizzard, which failed to dampen spirits; unfortunately, cold weather and a bad case of the flu kept me housebound this year, but you can check out the goings-on at Critical Mass, the NBCC blog.

Nonfiction

• Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
• Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
• Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
• Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Fiction

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
• Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Memoir/Autobiography

• Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
• Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
• Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry

• Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)
• Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
• Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• W.D. Snodrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism

• Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the WestFrom Within (Doubleday)
• Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon(Viking)
• Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
• Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences(McSweeney’s)

Biography

• Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
• Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
• Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin’s Press)
• Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

Speaking of mysteries, today is the 198th birthday of the strange genius considered to be the father of the detective story and crime fiction. Rather than leave a bottle of cognac and three roses on Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore grave like the city’s famous and mysterious Poe Toaster (memorably depicted in Laura Lippman’s In a Strange City), the Mystery Writers of America chose to commemorate the day by announcing their nominees for the 2007 Edgar Allen Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction and nonfiction published in 2006. 

Best novel nominees include:

The nominees for a Best First Novel by An American Author are:

Sarah Weinman’s mystery blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, offers an insightful analysis of what the nominations mean, pointing out that ” If there’s a trend, it’s toward intelligent fiction from outside our normal boundaries, be it historical, cultural or psychological”. Indeed of three of the best novel nominees—literary novelist Louis Bayard, Chocolat author Joanne Harris, and travel writer Jason Goodwin— would not be considered  mystery authors in the traditional sense. Maybe the  strict barriers that have placed genre fiction like mystery in a literary ghetto are starting to break down. Maybe like Edgar Allen Poe, mysteries can finally be judged on their own literary merits as fiction worthy of serious attention. 

The end of the year is fast approaching and critics’ Best Books lists are starting to litter the literary landscape. Our sister magazine Publishers Weekly announced its top 100 picks a few weeks ago, and yesterday the New York Times issued its 100 notable books of 2006 (Its 10 Best Books of 2006 will be announced tomorrow on its web site.) And we LJ editors are in the final throes of making our choices, which will be announced online next month and published in our January issue.

While I always enjoy seeing what my fellow critics have chosen, one of my reviewers, Teresa  Jacobsen of Solana County Library, did raise an interesting question about best book lists when she admitted that she had only read one novel on the list (Anne Tyler’s Digging to America)! ” Is this what happens when you love thrillers and genre fiction?”, she emailed. ”Thankfully, the B & T collection development librarian put many of those titles on my ODC list this past year–and I did order them–so perhaps I’ll read a few next year.  I’m curious to see if the folks in Fairfield, CA will want to read them or if they will stick with Robert B. Parker and Nelson DeMille?”

Is this the old case of you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink? For years publishers have debated the impact of literary awards on book sales; many don’t see much difference. Does the same hold true for library circulation? One librarian seems to think so. On his blog ChipK.com, Ohio librarian “Chip” noted  that a “disturbing portion” of books his library purchased largely on the basis of positive reviews in LJ did not circulate at a rate that justified their purchase. His post implied that LJ reviews were a waste of taxpayer money. 

So what is LJ supposed to do? Review only the Stephen Kings, Dean Koontzs, the Nora Roberts,  and other authors whose circulation stats are guaranteed? That would make for a pretty shallow collection. Our young librarian friend also failed to take a good look at our LJ bestsellers column, which identifies the books most borrowed in U.S. libraries. Many of the titles making the cut had received strong or starred reviews in LJ: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter , and Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan  .

While I hope our reviews played an important part in these books’ success, marketing was also key. In the case of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, it only became a bestseller/best-circulator when the paperback edition was picked up by reading groups. No longer can librarians order books, shelve them, and hope that patrons will find them. Librarians have to take a more active role in promoting their collections through creative displays, readers’ advisory, book groups, and author programs. And the time to start is now with our 2006 Best Books List.   

After all those years of failing to pick the winner (see my blog “Trilling with the Quills”), I finally got it right: Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel prize in literature. And not a moment too soon: Pamak has been deeply at odds with his own government for speaking out forthrightly about the Armenian genocide it does not choose to acknowledge, and the prize gives international weight to his struggle for free speech and national responsibility. Over the years, we have heard increasingly that the Nobel prize has become politicized, with some winners evidently picked because they fit an agenda. I want to beg that, appearance notwithstanding, Pamak doesn’t fit that category. He’s a lyric, nuanced writer who does what great writers all do: he opens up windows, shaking our beliefs and bringing us a new world. Let other winners grind their axes or fill their little niches; Pamak calls to mind giants like Russian poet Osip Mandelstam or Spanish poet Federico García Lorca; without writing rhetoric, without turning politician himself, he offers provocative and affecting fiction that upends society. It’s good to be reminded, as we surface from our escapist reading jags, that literature can make a difference. 

If you’re betting on book award winners—and you can; note that according to top British betting site Ladbrokes.com, odds are three to one that Turkish author Orhan Pamuk will win the Nobel Prize in literature tomorrow—don’t look at me. Okay, I was rooting hard for last year’s National Book Award winner in fiction, William Vollman’s Europe Central, and for the previous year’s poetry winner, Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain. But generally my favorites don’t come up winners. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the list of Quill Book Award winners—so many categories, so many opportunities for egg on the face.

First the good news. I was thrilled to see Al Gore win in the history/current events/politics caregory for An Inconvenient Truth, though I wish more people had voted for him in another, bigger race way back when. It’s good to know that people (dare I say) warm to perceptive discussions of current events; as LJ’s book-buying surveys have shown over the last few years, books in this area are trumping diet manuals and pop fiction at libraries nationwide. And, yes, I’m thrilled that John Grogan’s Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog got not one but two nods, for biography/memoir and audiobook. Among the dozens of books I have had the good fortune to introduce at FOLUSA-sponsored panels at the American Library Association convention over the years, this one remains at the top—funny, unsentimental, and a great read. Mine, by the way, is just about the world’s best dog, but I can still relate.

In my own assigning areas of fiction and poetry, alas, I came up short, though I’ll bow to the people’s choice. Winning in a fiction free-for-all is always A Dirty Job, and Christopher Moore had to do it, but now and again a literary title of historical significance captures the public’s imagination, and I was hoping that this was the year for Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. In general, this was a good list; I’m still looking hard at contender David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants for our best books compendium and would recommend that others look hard, too; Mitchell is a stylist with subtance who belongs up there with the best British novelists, and it’s gratifying to see an affecting tale like Gruen’s reach bestsellerdom.

A President’s poet, Maya Angelou not surprisingly was crowned people’s poet this year; it’s a diadem she already wears anyway, though I was thinking maybe Mary Oliver would be borrowing it this year. I can see why the meditative Oliver and the all-embracing Angelou would be popular, but I do wish that readers at large would get over their fear of American poetry. Edgy, lyric, and engaging, books like Jane Hirschfield’s After, Louise Gluck’s Averno, Carl Philips’s Riding Westward, and Kevin Young’s For the Confederate Dead could have been contenders. Check them out if you haven’t already, and while you’re at it, check out finalist Debra Dean in the debut category. Since nearly everyone loves to cook (just count me out), Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia did not shock as a winner, but Dean’s The Madonnas of Leningrad is at once elegent yet riveting fiction. 

Whatever anyone says, book awards are worthwhile because they make people talk about books, and they give critics one more way to spin good books at readers. The Quill Book Awards is an interesting means of expanding the literary conversation, though this year I could have done with a few less obvious choices (but, then, it’s not my choice). I wish there were more forums for promoting the little gems that aren’t so heavily marketed or don’t necessarily soar to the top of the best sellers lists. In fact, I’m working on an idea for that in LJ right now. In the meantime, in case you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Pamuk tomorrow. Just don’t bet on it.