National Book Awards finalists include two L.A. Times writers

The 20 finalists for the 2010 National Book Awards were announced Wednesday in Savannah, Ga., marking one significant achievement and the surprising exclusion of Jonathan Franzen’s mammoth novel “Freedom” from the fiction finalists amid familiar echoes of dissatisfaction.

Two Los Angeles Times staffers received nods for their nonfiction books, developed from their work for The Times: Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” and Megan K. Stack’s “Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War.” The National Book Foundation, which runs the awards, said that work from two reporters at a single news organization has not been recognized in the last decade.

“These nominations underscore our ongoing commitment to foreign news and high-quality journalism,” said Russ Stanton, editor of The Times. “We are extremely honored that the National Book Awards has recognized Barbara and Megan, two of the remarkably talented and dedicated reporters working at the Los Angeles Times.”

Other nonfiction nominees include John Dower for his “Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11,” Justin Spring for “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward Farrar” and the rock star Patti Smith for her memoir “Just Kids.”

Controversy was stirred by the fiction nominees. Franzen’s novel, one of the most talked-about books of the year, didn’t make the list, made up by a panel of five fellow writers. His last novel, “The Corrections,” won the National Book Award in 2001.

This year’s highest-profile fiction nominee is Peter Carey, with “Parrot and Olivier in America.” The others include the critically acclaimed Nicole Krauss for “Great House,” the under-recognized Lionel Shriver for “So Much for That” and two under-the-radar novelists, UC Santa Cruz professor Karen Tei Yamashita for “I Hotel” and Jaimy Gordon for “Lord of Misrule.”

For writers like these, being a finalist for the National Book Awards can make a tremendous difference.

“It didn’t change the way that I felt about my work, but I do know that it changed the way other people felt about my work,” said Elizabeth McCracken, a 1996 finalist. “And that was a great gift.”

Of the selection process, Laura Miller, the book critic of Salon.com, noted: “People who write literary fiction tend to be in a kind of insular world that they believe is the whole culture, when it’s just a tiny province. And novelists tend to use the awards to correct what they feel are injustices, which becomes more important than helping readers find the exceptional book of the year.”

Lev Grossman, who wrote a Time magazine profile of Franzen, whose “Freedom” didn’t make the list, wrote in an e-mail, “Like everybody else, I was surprised. If I made my list of the five best novels of 2010, it would include ‘Freedom.’ But I’m not a National Book Awards judge. I’ll be surprised and disappointed if it doesn’t at least make the shortlist for a major award this year.”

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The National Book Awards are among the nation’s most important literary honors, and its Nov. 17 gala in New York may be the book industry’s most glamorous gala.

The two Times reporters who were nominated have distinguished careers in international reporting.

A native of Ridgeway, N.J., Demick joined The Times in 2001 after working at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has been posted in Jerusalem, Sarajevo, Berlin, Seoul and currently Beijing, where she is the chief of The Times’ bureau. She won a George Polk Award for her reporting on North Korea. Demick graduated from Yale and before taking the Beijing post was a visiting fellow at Princeton teaching a course on coverage of repressive regimes. Her book is a look at the lives of half a dozen Korean defectors and how they coped with the vast shortages and the country’s oppressive rule.

Stack, a native of Danbury, Conn., joined The Times as the Houston bureau chief in 2001 after stints in Texas with the Associated Press and the El Paso Times. After two years in Houston, Stack began her career as a foreign correspondent for The Times with reporting stints that included Afghanistan, Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow and now Beijing. Her book is a poetic meditation on the post-Sept. 11 conflicts that shook America and the rest of the world. She won an Overseas Press Club Award in 2007 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist the same year.

carolyn.Kellogg@latimes.com