Happy Birthday (and Congrats), Tim O’Brien!

Photo by Benjamin D. Weller

Tim O’Brien won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 for Going After Cacciato. Here are a few excerpts from appreciations of the book on our National Book Awards Fiction blog:

“The book, for a budding writer, blew open a door in my mind that I didn’t even know was there.” -Marie Myung-Ok Lee

“I admire and often teach If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried, but it is Going After Cacciato I love most, and here that he plays most freely in the wild fields of fiction.” -Liz Rosenberg

“When Tim O’Brien allows Cacciato to walk away from his unit, he gives all of us who fought permission to walk away from the terrible literalness of war, freeing up the kind of stories we most needed to hear.” -Bruce Weigl

Read the appreciations in their entirety here.

Birthday present: The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation announced today that O’Brien will receive the 2012 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award!