Goodbye, Columbus Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959 Goodbye, Columbus is Philip Roth’s first work of fiction. It consists of the title work — a short novel — and five short stories. Roth was awarded a Literary Fellowship before this book was published, and it won the National Book Award in 1960. Many reviewers [...]
The Corrections Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, U.S.A. 2001 The Corrections won the 2001 National Book Award and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was runner-up for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, the 2002 Pen/Faulkner Award, and the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It was named one [...]
The Shipping News Annie Proulx MacMillan Publishing Company, U.S.A. 1993 The Shipping News won the 1993 National Book Award and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. It was also nominated for the 1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. It was made into a major motion picture in 2001. The true first edition is the first printing of this edition. They [...]
You Are Not a Stranger Here Adam Haslett Nan A. Talese, U.S.A. 2002 This awesome collection of nine short stories by Yale law student Adam Haslett was a 2002 finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Check the copyright page to see in which magazines some of these stories were first [...]
Malcolm Lowry: A Biography Douglas Day Oxford University Press, New York, 1973 Although Douglas Day uses outdated psychiatric models to dissect the life of Malcolm Lowry in this National Book Award winning biography, it is still a fascinating read. Lowry, a genius writer and an alcoholic with some profound psychological problems, overdosed on pills at age [...]
Herzog Saul Bellow Viking, New York, 1964 Saul Bellow was born in Quebec, but lived in the United States since he was nine. He won the Nobel Prize in 1976. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award three times and the only one to be nominated six times. He has also [...]
A Fable William Faulkner Random House, U.S.A. 1954 A Fable was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. According to Wikipedia, Faulkner worked for over ten years on this book and considered it his masterpiece. Even after winning the two biggest American literary awards, however, reviews were mixed, [...]
Waiting Ha Jin Pantheon, New York, 1999 Ha Jin was going to school on a scholarship at Brandeis University in Massachusetts during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The Chinese Government’s widespread use of violence and repression to put down this protest hastened Jin’s emigration plans and shaped his choice to write in English. He [...]