{"id":156922,"date":"2018-03-16T06:26:42","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T10:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=156922"},"modified":"2018-03-16T06:26:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T10:26:42","slug":"joan-silber-frances-fitzgerald-win-critics-circle-awards-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/03\/16\/joan-silber-frances-fitzgerald-win-critics-circle-awards-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Joan Silber, Frances FitzGerald win Critics Circle awards"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\u201cImprovement,\u201d<\/a>
\u201cImprovement,\u201d Joan Silber’s novel about interconnected lives spanning from Turkey to New York’s Harlem, won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. (Photo:<\/a> Joan Silber website)<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NEW YORK – \u201cImprovement,\u201d Joan Silber’s novel about interconnected lives spanning from Turkey to New York’s Harlem, won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.<\/p>\n

On a night when winners in all six competitive categories were women, Frances FitzGerald’s \u201cThe Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America\u201d was honoured Thursday for nonfiction and Caroline Fraser’s book on Laura Ingalls Wilder, \u201cPrairie Fires,\u201d won for biography.<\/p>\n

Silber has long been praised as a master of narrative, timing and capturing her characters’ inner lives. Her previous works include her acclaimed debut novel, \u201cHousehold Words,\u201d and the story collection \u201cIdeas of Heaven.\u201d FitzGerald, a celebrated journalist and author, is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Vietnam War, \u201cFire in the Lake,\u201d and for \u201cWay Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War,\u201d a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her latest work was a National Book Award finalist last fall.<\/p>\n

Others cited Thursday night included Layli Long Soldier in poetry for \u201cWhereas,\u201d Xiaolu Guo’s \u201cNine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China\u201d for autobiography and Carina Chocano’s \u201cYou Play The Girl\u201d for criticism.<\/p>\n

National Book Critics Circle award finalists included two of last year’s most-talked about novels, Jesmyn Ward’s \u201cSing, Unburied, Sing\u201d and Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling \u201cExit West.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NBCC also presented a lifetime achievement award to prize-winning author-journalist John McPhee and cited author-critic Charles Finch for \u201cexcellence in reviewing.\u201d Silber is among the authors Finch has praised. In a review last year in The Washington Post, he likened her to Alice Munro and Grace Paley and lamented that she was \u201ctoo little loved, too little mentioned, beyond a small readership that seems to be composed mostly of other writers.\u201d Carmen Maria Machado, author of the story collection \u201cHer Body and Other Parties: Stories,\u201d was given the John Leonard Prize for best debut book. Leonard, who died in 2008, was a founder of the National Book Critics Circle and had a long history of championing emerging writers.<\/p>\n

The NBCC was founded in 1974 and is comprised of more than 700 critics and editors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK – \u201cImprovement,\u201d Joan Silber’s novel about interconnected lives spanning from Turkey to New York’s Harlem, won the National …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":156929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[48449,48427,12863,48451,48450],"class_list":["post-156922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-art-and-culture","tag-improvement","tag-joan-silber","tag-national-book-critics-circle","tag-prairie-fires","tag-the-evangelicals-the-struggle-to-shape-america","mauthors-hillel-italie","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}