Annal:1982 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1982. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 34.32
An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel
- 1983 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1983 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1983 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1982 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 30.33
Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together—with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell….
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.32
The forty-seven stories in this collection, selected by Singer himself out of nearly one hundred and fifty, range from the publication of his now-classic first collection, Gimpel the Fool, in 1957, until 1981. They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.32
Albert Corde, dean of a Chicago college, is unprepared for the violent response to his expose of city corruption. Accused of betraying his city, as well as being a racist, he journeys to Bucharest, where his mother-in-law lies dying, only to find corruption rife in the Communist capital. Switching back and forth between the two cities, The Dean’s December represents Bellow’s “most spirited resistance to the forces of our time” (Malcolm Bradbury).
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.32
With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme’s work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.
