With confusion and controversy marking this year's National Book Awards, Harold Augenbraum, the new National Book Foundation executive director, said that there remain questions about its most prominent nonfiction nominee, even as he welcomed controversy in the fiction category.
Last week, responding to questions about how the 9/11 Commission Report would be handled if it won the nonfiction prize, Louise Brockett, spokesperson for W.W. Norton, the publisher of The9/11 Commission Report, acknowledged, "It's a very extraordinary collective effort, but you can't have a hundred people speaking in unison," referring to the book's many authors.
In an interview, Augenbraum went further, saying that the uncertainty goes beyond logistics to a more fundamental problem, namely, that the commission doesn't exist anymore. This means that the $10,000 prize, if the book wins, would have an uncertain fate, since it's not clear who would legally have the power to make the decision about what to do with the award. Even the $1,000 prize and a medal, which the book is already entitled to as a nominee, is currently caught in limbo. "We've been talking to Norton and to the commission and to our lawyers. But we haven't come up with anything yet," said Augenbraum.
For all the 9/11 confusion, Augenbraum said that he's unruffled by the concerns raised regarding the fiction nominees, all of whom come from New York. (New York magazine wondered if fiction judge chair Rick Moody was "the worst awards-administrator of his generation," an allusion to Dale Peck's coinage of Moody as the worst writer of his generation.) Augenbraum said, "If we're in a situation where we can have arguments about literature, then [it means] literature remains a viable entity."
Augenbraum also said that he was encouraged by the diversity of choices of the distinguished contribution award over the past three years, which included Judy Blume, Stephen King and Philip Roth—"Those were perfect," he said, describing how much influence each has had over large but different portions of the American public—and he could foresee even nonwriters receiving it in the future. "The award is about what people do for reading," he said.
