The Tenth of December Now Available in Paperback
The 2013 #NBAwards Finalist reads from his widely-acclaimed collection of short stories.
Read our interview with Saunders here.
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#Lit #George Saunders #NBAwards #Tenth of December #National Book Foundation#NBAwards Finalist GEORGE SAUNDERS has WON the 2014 Story Prize for Tenth of December.
A good time to share George Saunders’ appearance at last year’s Finalists Reading evening.
One of the stories in the book (‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’) took 14 years to finish—but honestly, even that was sort of pleasurable. I love the feeling of being on the hunt—the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.
NBF staffers are all verklempt over #NBAwards Finalist George Saunders’ winning his THIRD literary prize this month for Tenth of December.
Saunders’ most excellent interview with The Millions’ Edan Lepucki is up on our website here.
Talk amongst yourselves!
From his office at Syracuse University, George Saunders discusses the writing process and bringing his characters to life: http://nyr.kr/IEEYCd
2013 #NBAwards Fiction Finalist for Tenth of December.
Harold Augenbraum directs the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards. He’s on Reddit right now answering questions about American Lit, Awards, and even Marcel Proust until 4:30pm EST
It seems to me like the highest vision of the world is one in which you understand many seemingly contradictory things to be true at once.
Author George Saunders: “Holding Out A High Vision Of What Art Is Supposed To Do”
BuzzFeedBooks interviews 2013 #NBAwards Finalist George Saunders.
On Saturday, January 24, Penguin Random House CEO and National Book Foundation board member Markus Dohle will be making #TimeToRead in support of National Readathon Day. From noon to 4pm, book lovers across the country will read and raise funds to support the Foundation’s education efforts.
What will you be reading?
Tag and share a selfie of yourself with a book to show your support for National Readathon Day. We’ll collect and share your photos on our feeds. And don’t forget to pledge to be a part of National Readathon Day! Visit nationalbook.org for details and some incredible fundraising incentives (like, tickets to the 2015 National Book Awards ceremony!).
Happy Holidays from the National Book Foundation!
20 memorable quotes from the Winners and Finalists of the 2014 National Book Awards.
CONGRATULATIONS George Packer, WINNER of the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction
George Packer is a Brooklyn-based staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Shortly before the Awards Ceremony on November 20, Packer spoke with author Sally Tisdale for the National Book Foundation’s compilation of 2013 Finalists’ interviews.
Sallie Tisdale: You are also a playwright. Do you see connections between this character-driven style of reporting, the collage of events, and theatre?
George Packer: Fiction and plays were the mainstays of my reading appetite while I was growing up. For a while I wanted to be a stage actor. (After I sent him a fan letter, Laurence Olivier replied, politely but discouragingly.) I didn’t really know what nonfiction was—I mean as a positive literary form rather than as the absence of fiction, which is what the name implies—until I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia at age twenty-three. I published two—what’s a nice way to say this?—under-read novels. It took me a long time to find my strengths.
So by the time I came to The New Yorker in my early forties and became a full-time journalist, the prose models I carried around in my head weren’t journalistic. It seemed natural to write narrative, which meant to center my reporting around individuals, their talk, their actions, their inner lives. I also loved to read and write essays. With The Unwinding I decided to squeeze the essayistic impulse out of the book. There’s no guidance from a first-person singular. This privileges the voices of the characters and allows for a certain amount of experimentation with structure. In a way, it pushed the book in the direction of drama. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that my play Betrayed was staged the year I began to think about The Unwinding, in 2008.
ST: You make no secret of your opinions about certain famous characters and the events you describe. How do you define your work? Nonfiction is always in the process of being divided, categorized and defined. What is your name for what you do?
GP: Yes, the portraits of well-known people like Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Sam Walton, and Robert Rubin come with a point of view, though I think it’s mainly conveyed indirectly, through their own words and self-images. The book’s sympathies are with the ordinary people on the receiving end of decisions and attitudes that flow from the power centers like Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. But my main goal in The Unwinding isn’t polemical. I wanted to connect the reader to the American nervous system, to the history of the past generation as it’s felt by individuals. Since there are elements of reportage, political writing, and narrative, I don’t know what name to give my work other than the negative catch-all “nonfiction.” But I’m always trying for social criticism and craftsmanship, without sacrificing either for the sake of the other.
ST: How did you find your subjects? How did you convince ordinary people to reveal themselves to you so completely?
GP: Partly by chance, partly by looking. I met Dean Price, the truck-stop entrepreneur in North Carolina, while working on a New Yorker piece about Obama’s first year. At that point—early 2010—I didn’t even know what or who I was looking for to write The Unwinding. Dean’s voice and circumstances were so compelling that, while he played a minor role in the magazine piece, I began to think of him as a central person for the book. I went back down later that year and asked if he’d be willing to go along. Over the next two years I must have paid him six or seven visits, stayed at his house, spent weeks with him, drove all over the state, watched him in action, got to know his family, friends, and business partners, asked him everything I could think of. The revelations came slowly over this long period, and they came with the building of trust. He probably didn’t know he was signing up for all that at the start, but our time together was interesting and exciting for both of us, I think. We became close. I listened and listened, and you can’t fake that level of interest for two years. At one point Dean even turned the tables and came up to stay with me, to learn about my life in Brooklyn.
In other cases—for example, Tammy Thomas, the ex-factory worker and community organizer in Youngstown, Ohio—I went looking for someone whose story could dramatize a larger theme: deindustrialization in the Rust Belt, the housing bust in the Sun Belt, the tech boom in Silicon Valley, the rise of organized money in Washington. But the process of making a connection and gaining trust is basically the same. It takes someone extraordinary on the other end.
ST: You mention the repeated nature of “unwinding” social structures and creating new ones. We’ve just seen a government shutdown and near default. You end with several of your characters in the middle of their stories –how much further do you think this unwinding can go?
GP: Nothing that’s happened since the publication of the book makes me think I overdid it. Our institutions keep deteriorating; inequality keeps soaring; the sense of elemental unfairness and things fundamentally not working grows deeper. On the other hand, people go on living their lives and trying to find answers where they live. Those are the sparks of hope in the book, and they’re still out there, still breathing.
Sallie Tisdale is the author of seven books, including The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, a finalist for the James Beard Award for Writing, and Talk Dirty to Me. She was a National Book Awards nonfiction judge in 2010.
Questlove at The National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Party, 11/17/14
… to being a person who sends art out into the world.“ YES! Thank you Kate!
This week, we were thrilled to announce the Longlists for the 2019 National Book Awards. These titles in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature represent some of the best writing of the year. The Finalists will be announced October 8, all in the lead up to the 70th National Book Awards on November 20.
alwaysbringabookwithyou
all-these-paperback-dreams
Barnes and Nobles is gonna start serving food and alcohol.
Everybody’s cracking jokes about how it’s a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the age of Amazon.
But you know what? Props to them. This is exactly what Blockbuster didn’t do. At no point was Blockbuster like “Hey, movie rentals aren’t the lucrative enterprise they once were. Perhaps it’s time we become known for our cheesy garlic bread.”
that’s a fantastic plan, honestly? i would 100% go sit at a bookshop, buy a glass of wine, and pick up the newest biography. 50/50 i’d decide to buy it after a couple chapters, and even if i don’t, that’s still money i spent at B&N!
They could host book clubs with food and drinks where one of the employees shares their experiences with a book of their choice and tries to convince the guests to buy it.
Barnes and noble realizing the only reason people go to brick and mortar stores is for the experience and access to an enjoyable physical space they can socialize in (sure isnt for the price) and capitalizing on that is a stroke of genius and a really refreshing approach to the dilemma of competing with online stores
