National Book Award winners.

The National Book Award winners have been announced. [via National Book Awards]

Fiction: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, Bloomsbury USA
Non-fiction: Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, W. W. Norton & Company
Poetry: Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split, TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press
Young People’s Literature: Thanhha Lai, Inside Out & Back Again, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

d

Full take on Parallel Stories.

Scott Esposito’s full take on the very long and apparently sometimes impressive Parallel Stories.

An excerpt:

When Nádas maintains a balance between the action he is describing and the consciousnesses behind it, his characters become lifelike and the scenes meander along at a pleasing clip. But often the modus operandi for Parallel Stories is the opposite — to halt all motion by vastly expanding each and every tick of a heightened moment. Proust could do this with amazing facility, seemingly unable to find a single dull sentiment no matter how deeply he probed a moment, but Nádas’s results are mixed. Beneath this haze of adjectives and excessive details the reader will often enough strike upon genuinely insightful observations, but in the book’s denser stretches the search can become tiresome.

[via Barnes and Noble]