The judges of America's National Book Awards are under fire for having turned their fiction category into a "Municipal Book Award" by picking as finalists five obscure women writers living in Manhattan. "It defies logic to think that five such similar books just happen to be the best of the year," said New York Times critic Caryn James in an article on Thursday that thundered against the "claustrophobic sameness" of the fiction list.
The winners of the National Book Awards, a major US literary prize, will be announced next Wednesday and while the fiction nominations have angered booksellers, editors and critics for being so narrow, the nominations for non-fiction have been hailed for their diversity.
The non-fiction finalists range from the final report of the 9/11 Commission to a highly praised life of Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt called "Will in the World.'
By contrast, none of the five fiction nominees has sold more than 2,800 copies of their entries and several industry veterans said the first time they heard of the books was when they were nominated.
The annual prize is open to all US authors. Many critics were outraged not to see Philip Roth on the list for his new book "The Plot Against America", a historical fantasy that has won good reviews.
Instead the finalists were: Lily Tuck's "The News From Paraguay", Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's "Madeleine is Sleeping", Kate Walbert's "Our Kind: A Novel in Stories", Christine Schutt's "Florida" and Joan Silber's "Ideas of Heaven: a Ring of Stories".
The award is organised by The National Book Foundation, which picks a different panel of judges each year from America's top literary circles, and has ambitions to rival the Pulitzer Prize or Britain's Booker Prize in prestige.
Herman Gollob, a former co-chairman of the National Book Foundation, said he had never heard of any of this year's fiction finalists and was not encouraged to read them.
"It's supposed to be an achievement award for the best that's been done, not a feel good award for aspiring writers," he said.
"These (books) represent the taste particularly of the chief judge," said John Baker, a columnist at Publishers' Weekly, referring to novelist and short-story writer Rick Moody who heads the five member panel.
"It's certainly an unusual choice - a couple of these books might have made it but to have five such similar books was a surprise," Baker told Reuters.
Much has been made of the fact that all five are women living in New York. But critic James said more limiting was that the books were all ruled by a "short-story aesthetic".
"Not one of these books is big and sprawling. And not one has much of a sense of humour," James said, noting that in "Madeleine is Sleeping", the whole of one chapter consists of the line: "Madeleine stirs in her sleep."
The judges are barred from discussing their choices, a spokeswoman for the prizes said. There are four categories in total: fiction, non fiction, poetry and young people's literature.
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