Annal:1981 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1981. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1982 WFA–Novel nominee
- 1981 Booker shortlist
- Score: 22.31
By turns a dream of electrifying eroticism recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud, and a horrifying yet calmly unsensational narrative of the Holocaust, this PEN Silver Pen winner is now recognized as a modern classic that reconciles the nightmarish with the transcendent.
Ellis Island and Other Stories
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.32
Marshall Pearl is orphaned at birth aboard an illegal immigrant ship off the coast of Palestine in 1947 and brought as an infant to America. Determined to see the world in its beauty, ferocity, and ultimate justice, he does so, in scenes of gorgeous color and great excitement, as a child in the Hudson Valley, fighting the Rastafarians in Jamaica, at Harvard, in a slaughterhouse on the Great Plains, in the Mexican desert, on the sea, and in the Alps. Finally, he is drawn to Israel to confront the logic of his birth in a crucible of war, magic, suffering, and…
Dad: A Novel
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.32
John Tremont, a middle-aged man with a family, is summoned to his mother’s bedside after she has suffered a heart attack. When he arrives, he finds her shaken but surviving: it is his father, left alone, who is unable to cope, who begins to fail, to slip away from life. Joined by his nineteen-year-old son, John suddenly becomes enmeshed in the frightening, consuming, endless minutiae of caring for a beloved, dying parent. He also finds himself inescapably confronting his own middle age, jammed between his son’s feckless impatience to get on with his life and his…
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.31
Now in his mid-thirties, Nathan Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent sixties. Not only is he assumed by his fans to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky (“Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?”), but he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisers, and sidewalk literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if “target” may be more than a figure of…
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.31
The Stories of Ray Bradbury—a hundred of his best stories, selected by the author himself—is the definitive collection of one of the greatest fantasists the world has ever known. Published in 1980, the volume contains stories selected from the first four decades of Bradbury’s career. There are his unique stories of Mars, which later landed in The Martian Chronicles. There are nostalgic stories of Green Town, Illinois, which Bradbury later brewed into Dandelion Wine. The treasures here also include his regional tales of Ireland and of rural…
