James McBride was even surprised last night when he won the National book Award in Fiction in New York Wednesday night for his satire Good Lord Bird. George Packer also won the nonfiction prize for his The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
Good Lord Bird beat Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Pynchon, who usually doesn’t attend events, did not appear at the ceremony, reports The LA Times.
McBride’s novel is told from the point of view of an escaped slave and is set in pre-Civil War America. As The New York Times notes, he was surprised by the win, since many picked him as an underdog. He didn’t even have a speech prepared. He noted that the book reflects his own personal tragedies, like the deaths of his mother and niece, as well as his marriage, which was falling apart.
“It was always nice to have somebody whose world I could just fall into and follow him around,” he said.
As for Packer, the New Yorker staff writer focused his book on the current economic decline in small towns and large cities. It “casts a discerning eye on banks and Wall Street while tracing the painful dissolution of much of our economic infrastructure,” the judges said.
When he picked up the award, he thanked “Americans who gave me the great gift of trusting me with their stories and allowing me into their lives so I could try to illuminate some of what’s gone wrong with America in the last generation and in their own lives, some of what’s gone right.”
The ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street was hosted by Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski. Each winner gets a bronze statue and a $10,000 prize.
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