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Awards Season Not Quite Over - LA Times Book Award Finalists Announced
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As you continue to nurse your week-long Academy Award champagne hangover and try desperately to block all memory of the "sound effects choir" & Celine Dion's massacre of Ennio Morricone's work (just as Elina predicted!), it should come as a relief to you that while there are yet more awards on the horizon, these are of the bookish kind. The LA Times has announced their Book Awards Finalists.
While it may take more work on your part to read these books than to watch the Oscar-nominated films, the LA Times Book Awards won't be littered with nearly as many fashion disasters and kiss-up interviewers. We hope. While all the finalists are divine, we're secretly rooting for the finalists in bold. Who are your favorite dark horses? Which books have you read and loved, which ones have you avoided on spec?
Winners will be announced April 27 at the LA Times Book Festival.
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Fiction
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (Random House)
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown)
Susan Straight, A Million Nightingales (Pantheon)
Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone (Little, Brown)
A.B. Yehoshua, A Woman in Jerusalem -- translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Hacourt)
Mystery/Thriller
Michael Connelly, Echo Park (Litle, Brown)
Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (Riverhead)
George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener (Little, Brown)
Jess Walter, The Zero (HarperCollins)
Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)
Biography
Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
Rodney Bolt, The Librettist ofVenice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America (Bloomsbury)
Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Alfred A. Knopf)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
Current Interest
Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricaine Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (William Morrow)
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Random House)
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfield, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (Little, Brown)
Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Poetry
Erin Belieu, Black Box (Copper Canyon Press)
Adrian C. Louis, Logorrhea (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
Thom Satterless, Burning Wyclf (Texas Tech University Press)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Michael Waters, Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions)
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Tony D'Souza, Whiteman (Harcourt)
Lisa Fugard, Skinner's Drift (Scribner)
Jennifer Gilmore, Golden Country (Scribner)
Alice Greenway, White Ghost Girls (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)
Janice Cooke Newman, Mary (MacAdam/Cage)
History
Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (S&S)
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin Press)
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking)
John Tayman, The Colony (Lisa Drew/Scribner)
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)
Support for LAist comes from
Science and Technology
Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic Books)
Ann Gibbons, The First Human: the Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors (Doubelday)
Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (W.W. Norton)
Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton)
Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (W.W. Norton)
Young Adult Fiction
M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)
Coe Booth, Tyrell (Push/Scholastic)
John Green, An Abundance of Katherines (Dutton Books/Penguin Books for Young Readers)
Meg Rosoff, Just in Case (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House)
Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial Books/Penguin Young Readers Group)
Photo by jimw via Flickr
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