National Book Critics Circle announces 2012 award nominees
The National Book Critics Circle recently announced its nominees for its 2012 awards and, as with every year, a hubbub was kicked up around the fiction choice. The dilemma is usually the same one: the struggle between acknowledging popular literary fiction and championing newcomers while trying to cover all the bases.
Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot cover the popular front. Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City, Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia, and British writer Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger cover the less commercially popular but critically acclaimed territories, while Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision represents the outsider, dark horse position. This year's controversy surrounds the exclusion of Chad Harbach's debut novel, The Art of Fielding - considered to be a shoe-in - and Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, which has recently been slated for a serialized TV adaptation.
Though the controversy is no doubt unintended, it seems inevitable. Regardless, it makes for a bit of excitement in the world of publishing and that's always welcome.
