National Book Award:
S.F. author Adam Johnson wins for fiction.
Adam Johnson has won the National Book Award for Fiction for his story collection “Fortune Smiles.”
It’s the second major award for the San Francisco author: He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2013 novel “The Orphan Master’s Son.”
Accepting the award in New York, Johnson said, “I told my wife and kids, ‘don’t come across America, because this isn’t going to happen.’”
In his review of the book for The Chronicle, Don Waters wrote, “These six long, fearless stories explore dangerous territories, both personal and political. … Johnson’s boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading. He may send us across the world, but we feel close to his characters because he gives us intimate access to their inner workings.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates won the nonfiction award for “Between the World and Me,” an open letter to his 15-year-old son about race in America.
Pamela Newkirk, in her review of the book for The Chronicle, called it “poignant, revelatory and exceedingly wise … an essential clarion call to our collective conscience.”
The poetry award went to Robin Coste Lewis for “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” and Neal Shusterman won for young people’s literature for “Challenger Deep.”
Each award winner receives $10,000.
James Patterson, best known for his bestselling Alex Cross novels, was presented with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. (“Is that even a word? Literarian?” quipped the humorist Andy Borowitz, who hosted the ceremony.) Patterson has donated millions of dollars to school libraries and independent bookstores and has given hundreds of thousands of books to soldiers and schoolchildren.
“Let’s make sure there’s another generation of readers out there,” Patterson urged the audience.
Jennifer Egan presented Don DeLillo with the annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. “His sensibility is epic,” Egan said in her remarks. “There is chutzpah in the sheer range of his books.” But, she added, “His work is most astounding at the level of the sentence. … DeLillo’s prose never settles for mere beauty or lyricism.”
DeLillo, in his short speech, mused about the power of books “in their native skin” versus the “ectoplasmic drip of electronic devices.” When he lifts books from one of his shelves, “gazing at them like a museumgoer,” he said, “I understand the power of memory that a book carries with it … who I was, where I was, what the book meant to me.”
Past National Book Award winners include Ralph Ellison, Jonathan Franzen, Pauline Kael, James McBride and Susan Sontag.