Eddie Fisher surely copped the prize for sartorial brass and the Man with the World's Biggest Feet won the award for, well, you know. But many other prizes were given out over the weekend, in a number of categories.
Top winners in the 1999 Audie Awards: for Abridged Fiction, Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, (Audio Literature); for Unabridged Fiction, A Widow for One Year by John Irving (Random House AudioBooks); for Abridged Non-fiction, The Professor &the Madman by Simon Winchester (Harper Audio); and for Unabridged Non-fiction, Full Circle by Michael Palin (Chivers North America).
In the Lambda Literary Awards, the prize for Gay Men's Fiction was awarded to An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis (St. Martin's), and the prize for Lesbian Fiction went to Cavedweller by Dorothy Allison (Dutton). And the Lammies in p try went to Cigarette by Marianne Faithful (Cleis Press) and Ten Commandments by J.D. McClatchy (Knopf).
Among the 1999 Firecracker Alternative Awards, the Outstanding Independent Press of the Year was Cleis Press; the winner in Fiction was The Leather Daddy and the Femme: An Erotic Novel by Carol Queen (Cleis Press); and the winner in Nonfiction was Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio (Seal Press).
The Publishers Marketing Assocation's Benjamin Franklin Awards were given to books in many categories, including Best First Book, The End Is Near: Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia (Dilettante Press); Best New Voice, Sun Valley: An Extraordinary History (The Idaho Press); and Book of the Year for Excellence &Innovation in Marketing, The Communist Manifesto (Verso).
Among the Before Columbus/American Book Awards, the Editor/Publisher Award was given to Bobby and Lee Byrd of Cinco Puntos Press and Robert Hawley of Oyez. A Lifetime Achievement Award went to Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
The three BlackBoard Books of the Year were: for Fiction, One Better by Rosalyn McMillan (Warner Books); for Nonfiction, In the Meantime by Iyanla Vanzant (Simon &Schuster); and for Children's, I Love My Hair by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley, illustrated by E.B. Lewis (Little, Brown).
The Charles S. Haslam Award for Excellence in Bookselling went to Amy Thomas, Pegasus &Pendragon Books, Berkeley and Oakland, Calif.; and the 1999 Charley Haslam International Scholarship Award went to Jennifer Anglin of Enchanted Forest, Dallas, Tex.
The Lucile Micheels Pannell Award, given to a children's bookseller by the Women's National Book Association, went to Chauni Haslet of All for Kids Books and Music, Seattle, Wash.
