#53: Are the NBCCs the Greatest American Book Awards?

Three Percent Podcast

On this week's podcast, we welcome National Book Critics Circle board member Carolyn Kellogg to talk about the NBCC awards, the changes to the National Book Award (which set me off on a bit of a paranoid rant), Bookish and its suckishness, and a variety of other literary topics.

I also want to add a bit of an update. Since the time we spoke, I've finished HHhH and most of NW, and contrary to all the niceties expressed on this podcast, I'm pretty bummed out about the NBCC finalists for fiction. Both HHhH and NW are staggeringly mediocre and should be replaced by Satantango and Maidenhair. Then again, the sheer literary quality of a list of books including these two masterpieces along with Lydia Millet's Magnificence would be so mind-blowingly amazing that no future list could ever match up. In other words, the NBCC chose to middle-mind the shit out of their list of finalists to save you--the readers--from experiencing too much literary joy all at once. That's the best explanation I can come up with, since, wow, I gave these books way too much credit before reading them.

And don't even get me started on the fact that Errol Morris's A Wilderness of Error isn't on there. (I totally blanked on this while we were recording.) But as a nod to my other conspiracy theories, I'll give the NBCC the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume Wilderness isn't a finalist because of Joe McGinniss.