(Inter)National Book Award Finalists
The announcement ten days ago of the finalists for the National Book Award prompts a thoughtful riposte from Liesl Schillinger to the comment made last fall by Horace Engdahl, then spokesman for the Swedish Academy, which decides the Nobel literature prize, that American fiction is “too isolated, too insular”:
…Three of the five candidates in the fiction category [for this year’s National Book Award] were not born in this country; two of those three live abroad.
[H]ow can our literary tastes be “isolated” and “insular” when they can be assimilated and imitated so successfully? And what does it mean to write an “American” book, if you don’t need an American address to do it?
