Annal:1991 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1991. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Mating: A Novel
- 1991 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1991 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.41
Set in the African republic of Botswana—the locale of his acclaimed short story collection, Whites—Norman Rush’s novel simultaneously explores the highest of intellectual high grounds and the most tortuous ravines of the erotic. tackles the geopolitics of poverty and the mystery of what men and women really want.
- 1991 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.41
In The MacGuffin, Elkin narrates with accustomed panache the mysterious events that take place in something under forty hours in the life of Bobby Druff, City Commissioner of Streets, aged fifty-eight, whose ordered world of avenues and roads seems suddenly a rather more complicated maze than he remembers. Events, in fact, conspire against him, and his wife, his son, his new-found lover, even his chauffeur, appear to be in on it. The novel combines a sort of tough-talking, laugh-out-loud humor and that odd, amusing, under-the-breath revenge of the…
- 1991 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 1991 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1991 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.41
As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek’s once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives—as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.
Frog: A Novel
- 1992 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1991 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.42
The esteemed and prescient critic John Hollander wrote that “Frog represents a new phase of Stephen Dixon’s work, and manifests a new concentration of creative power and unfailing rhetorical control, and it should certainly bring him the broadened recognition which is already so deep a one.”
