Transcripts For CSPAN2 2017 National Book Critics Circle Awa

CSPAN2 2017 National Book Critics Circle Awards May 31, 2017

Each year the National Book critics circles awards are presented to the best books published in the United States as voted on by 600 literary critics. Heres this years Award Ceremony from the new school in new york city. Its 90 minutes. Hello, everyone. Good evening and welcome. Im the director of the creative writing and we are happy to welcome back our friends. For over 15 years we have been honored to host this award in the auditorium. For the fifth year from the Creative Writing Program interviewed the finalists in a series of interviews can you hear me . Okay, the interview is posted on the blog and the website. You can check them out on book critics. Org. Organizing and posting over 30 interviews over a threeweek period is a huge job and one that couldnt have been job without kelly stewart, student interviewers and the others. Thank you to the Board Members and sylvan simon for all of their efforts and a huge thank you for the board i wonder if we can get a round of applause to the board. [applause] they may mention this also got it is entirely volunteer or actually this whole enterprise has been volunteer job. And i think that today its been called preaching to the choir but we need to remember to call our congressmen and senators. Some things we would like to have happen or not have happen we would like to keep funding for healthcare and planned parenthood. The books editor and board president of the National Book critics circle. [applause] its nice to see so many people here tonight. Im the president of the National Book critics circle any its my pleasure to welcome youm to the Award Ceremony for the publishing year 2016. We are delighted to have you join us this evening as we honor the outstanding books of the year in six categories, fiction, nonfiction, biography,y, autobiography, poetry and criticism. Id like to extend our gratitude to the authors that have joined us here tonight from across thea country and around the globe agents and publicists put their work to the attention. The National Book critics circle was founded in 1974 with a conversation that took place at the Algonquin Hotel among a group of critics but wanted to establish a set of awards given by the critics themselves. Amont among the extraordinary titles over the decades are maxine kingstons warrior, the son solomon, the photography, james the changing light at sand over and the brief wondrous life of oscar wilde to name just a few. Its grown to include 700 members from across the country plus more than 200 nonvoting student members into supporting friends of the nbcc. Its expanded to include the john leonard enterprise, the notable citation for excellence in reviewing and recognizing outstanding reviews by a member, the Lifetime Achievement award for individuals or institutions that have made an extraordinaryr contribution to the world of letters. In these and many other plays the activities, panels and events they sponsor throughout the year the organization has grown far beyond what the founders might have imagined. A nurturinthey nurture and suppe development of the next generation of book critics. The project was shepherded through an already hectic award season by Elizabeth Taylor a board member and other board a members read more than 100 submissions by inspiring critics young and old. We are pleased to announce the first class of fellows are paul w. Gleason, summer mcdonald, Ishmael Mohammed and heather scott. I believe Zachary Graham is with us tonight and if you are what you stand and get some applause. [applause] tonight is the culmination of 12 months of extensive reading, discussion, argument,s and coun counterargument, online and facetoface. At the beginning of each year the 24 member board divides itself into the awarding memb categories in a month is followed as humanly possible in each of those respective categories. After the selection of the finalists in january, all 24 Board Members read every one of the 30 titles. A twomonth long marathon that is testimony to the high level of commitment by the board. Earlier today we met in the classroom here at the new school and talked about each group of finalists and tonight we arere proud to name the recipients of the award. I would like to ask them to stand so that we might recognize their effort. [applause] the Board Members are elected to threeyear terms in several members are at the end of the return each year cycling off the board and i would like to take a moment to recognize them for their work. Collect, david, charles and camilla. [applause] the nbcc couldnt put together our Public Events without the generosity and support of so many people and institutions. I would like to thank in particular the new school and movies, the writer of the program into the associate director who make things run so smoothly. We thank them for making their facilities available to the nbcc for our ceremony. Id also like to thank the individual organizations that supported us this year, the institute for public knowledge, center for fiction, the wine and spirits magazine, the ace hotel and a special thank you as well who joined us to help publicize the nbcc who is up in the booth indicates the organizationo tho running in small and crucial ways and also to our vp for the awards to undertake the complex task of tonights events through the blog, twitter, facebook and instant graham. I invite you all to toast thefan finalists. It will be held at the center just a block up from here and 55 west 13th street on the second floor. Tickets can be purchased at the door. We greatly appreciate your support. Selling copies of the book by the finalists and Award Winners and we encourage you to patronize them. To get things started, one more thing i want to say to people as they come up to receive their awards, you can come up either side i would just ask after you have received your award from a stand on the stage for a second, some photographers want to shoot you, not literally. [laughter] then the new board member is stage left and he will escort you off into the green room where hes going to shoot a series of portraits and he will accompany you back into the auditorium. Its easier than it sounds. To get things started i would like to welcome the board member to present the john leonard prize. Thank you. [applause] good evening. It is an honor for me to be here this evening to present this award which you probably know is givenoticegiven by the members e best book of any genre. When i was in high school ten or 12 years ago writing reviews for a Student Newspaper i read a lot of critics but the one i always looked for, the byline i looked for was john leonard and what i realized and strove to emulate was the modesty, responsibility and generosity. He was a critic that was utterly serious about literature and new not take himself too seriously. Before it was popular to do so he took a special interest in the new and minority place fiction so i think that he would be delighted with this years winner. Yaa gyasi wraps around the American Experience of slavery. The spine of the story is a bifurcated family tree. The competent debut shows the way they are tainted with a terrible sin of human bondage. Yaa gyasi was born in, and grew up in the American South in huntsville alabama. She has an english degree from stanford and ian and mfa from iowa. She lives in new york city now and writes like an angel. It is my honor and pleasure to present the john leonard prize for the best first book in any genre to yaa gyasi for home going. [applause] congratulations. [applause] im so grateful to be here celebrating with all of you tonight. Thank you to the National Book critics circle for this tremendous honor and to see leonard and the late john leonard for championing new writers. What a privilege it is to bevils recognized for the john leonard award tonight. Id also liki would also like ty brilliant editor, my firecracker of a publicist and my endlessly encouraging agent all of whom believe in this book so fiercely. Another thank you to Matthew Nelson for his exclusive partnership. Finally i would like to thank my family especially my parents who came to this country with littlt more than the clothing on their backs and the children in their arms. Any time it feels like every day immigrants and refugees are being met with new fronts to their humanity and even more grateful for the sacrifices my appearance made so that i could one day stand here before all of you and accept this award. Thank you again. [applause] good evening and welcome to the make America Great again read again portion of the program. Its been my privilege to serve as the chair of the committee. Each year, the nbcc awards for excellence in reviewing to recognize outstanding work by one of our members. The citation is awarded in honor of a Founding Member of this organization is. Since 2012, the citation comes with a thousand dollar cash prize endowed by the board member yours truly. [applause] on a personal note i would likea to take a minute to say that it was 50 years ago today that the book editor of a small texas daily added that the title book critic to the byline of this then 17yearold writer. Book critics who. After careful deliberation, the committee selected the following finalists for the 2016. They are julia klein, leo wabsen, christian lorenzen, michelle dean, and becca. This years award goes to michelle dean. [applause] her journalism and criticism appears regularly in the guardian, the new republic, salon and many other distinguished publications. Shes been a fulltime writer since 2012. Her book about women critics ani intellectuals titled sharp thehn women who made an art out of having an opinion is forthcoming from grove atlantic. Without further ado, please join me in giving a warm welcome to michelle dean. [applause] thank you for letting me get it. Speak tonight. That. Speak tonight. Im glad to be in this company. I think im expected to Say Something about criticism, but ive never been very big on what i think of the claims of criticism and i reject this whole business of drawing thewh line between critics and others. No critic i know of, not Dorothy Parker were others ever considerethat wereconsidered hes opposed to a writer so i want to Say Something about writing instead. St not long ago on the internet, i saw a photograph of a small baby raccoon and it was hunched over on a road and the caption somebody had given it read when you realize you dont want to be responsible for anything anymore and you just want to be map and be small. I see pictures of cute animals on the internet every day and im not usually seized by then the way that i was this one. The desire to abdicate and give up, for me that is primal righti now. Like everybody els else alive, m fighting a slight response over time. Theres a lot going on. Every day brings fresh fear and outrage and although we have these tiny outlets of action,thn the internet posts petitions and marches, no single one of them is going to fix what is happening. The world is on the verge of something and one way to look at it is that we are climbing up the ar arc of the moral univers. But im present vantage it is pretty hard to see if it is actually bending towards justice the way Martin Luther king said. Its natural to want to look away. I want to look away the last few years i think we all have. The brave new world of ours that started before november 8 and the struggle we presently find ourselves in is not a mistake fluke. If she was around to tell us, she would point out it came from something that has been simmering here for years. It was not a big bang and it crept into our lives while we were napping. Sometimes power works that way but i still wish we hadnt missed it. As i thought about this a few weeks ago i picked up for the First Time Since i was assigned as a Canadian High School student and of course you know all the jokes now aboutow approaching nonfiction and you dont need me to make another one. But reading it, but i thought about was mostly ther theres sa few books like that being published right now. The application of literary intelligence to this question of power is kind of out of style and many writers seem more interested in exploring themselves with the limits of the fiction that power is the way we create it and inflict it on others. These questions might have a role in those books but they are not usually the central the occupation. To borrow a phrase from one of the speeches, i would never ask a writer to be a jukebox, but there is a kind of lookin walkiy going on right now by a lot of writers who should know bettersh and im kind of troubled way that. By design, writers live their lives in what foster once called our own tiny kingdom. E we are so very often a loan but it doesnt relieve the responsibility of getting up and walking around. Im just as skeptical about literature as i am the claims of criticism. But i do think there is a bottomline to writing. Bottom line to writing. When a writer is supposed to do is Pay Attention a good novelist pays attention to the characters, a good biographer pays attention to the documents before her and a good criticic pays attention to things she has been brought to evaluate. Paying attention is the only thing that guarantees insight and the only weapon we have against power because you cant fight the things that you cant actually see. The power a writer has is the power to make things visible an they are the things we do not typically look at or think about. Telling a story about these things as this enormous power. People are going to forget the headline that will remember a story so here is the one i think about a lot. In my other writing life as a journalist, i met this young woman last year who had been literally trapped for most of her life. Her name was gypsy. Her whole life her mother insisted she was incredibly sicy and then one day she realized her mother had been lying to her and with her lies from others hr strapped the two of them in this broad. She tried to get away but her mother physically wouldnt let her go so she found a young mant on the internet, fell in love with him and after she asked him to, she told her mother. Now she is in prison trying to figure out who she is in the aftermath of all that. At the same time as i was reporting the story, i happened to be given a book to review and it was a big brick of a book about a man pretty clearly the authors alter ego that felt trapped and i will say it here because i said it in print i didnt like this novel that i knew one of the reasons i disliked it was the novelists and curiosity about actual suffering in the world. He just had no idea that my dislike turned into this rhetoric as it happened so much i suspect that it won me this award as a critic because i got a little bit funny and savage in the way that i yelled at him in print. But i only wanted to remind him as i fell off and have to remind myself to Pay Attention. Thank you. [applause] [applause] hello, everybody. My name is david and its been my privilege to chair the Lifetime Achievement award this year in the committee. It is a Great Committee to chair because all of the potential nominees are phenomenal. The award is named for a Founding Member of the National Book critics circle and the award honors significant and sustained contributions to thes literary culture. During 34 years the award has been presented, weve honored individuals like Toni Morrison and whose achievements have been so universally acknowledged that their choice needed no explanation. In other years we have been pleased to call attention to such as Bill Henderson of the press, the archives, and who had not yet received the recognition that the lifetime contribution to the literary culture is served. The literary culture is margaret attwood. [applause] tonight we honor her accomplishments for her work as a novelist and essayist and critic for the influence on writers and editors and publishers were the human beings into were in survive for writing about surviving on civil rights rights, human rights and environmental degradation and writing about surviving with dignity and decency. For all of this and more she needs no introduction. They will get one anyway. To introduce Margaret Atwood on to this stage a literaryhe agent since 1963 and her career began in the city at the reynolds agency which was the first literaryerary agency in the United States established in the 80s for bush she later jollied that agency and a 1971 g. O. P. The agency in greenwich alleged it in 1975 she took her shop and writers out west. [applause] again and again i became margarets literary agent 48 years ago and it is hard to believe that because i dont feel that and as we all know time goes very fast. And did not meet her and tell 1970 but i discovered her 1969 and picked up her novel the edible woman from a bookstore window in montreal. I a ticket back to my Brooklyn Heights apartment in the read it through the night. As dawn came i was so filleds, s with his brilliance that i went out to the problem id just to walk back and forth and back and forth with the energy it came from those pages. That. I had to find her. I went into the office there was an editor that i knew his name was peter. Hot in those the phones had to space sit so i was dialing well the light came on and i picked it up and itso was peter im sorry it was peter davison. There is a lot of peters. [laughter] so peter said i am about to publish a book of a cana

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