National Book Award Winners

For those of you waiting impatiently for the announcement of the National Book Award winner for 2008, you wait no longer. They are just in time for your holiday list. The winners for each category are:

Fiction

Peter Matthiessen.Shadow Country: a new rendering of the Watson legend
Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.



Nonfiction

Annette Gordon-Reed. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Historian and legal scholar Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson.



Young People's Literature

Judy Blundell. What I saw and how I lived.In 1947, with her jovial stepfather Joe back from the war and family life returning to normal, teenage Evie, smitten by the handsome young ex-GI who seems to have a secret hold on Joe, finds herself caught in a complicated web of lies whose devastating outcome change her life and that of her family forever.



Poetry

Mark Doty. Fire to fire: new and collected poems.
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects-our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives-echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.

Posted by SH