Annal:1992 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Maus: A Survivor's Tale: Volume 2. And Here My Troubles Began
- 1992 LATimes–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.42
Acclaimed as a “quiet triumph” and a “brutally moving work of art,” the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father’s terrifying story, and History itself. This long-awaited sequel moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladek’s harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps, and the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Stories
- 1992 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.42
Folk in the eastern North Carolina town of Tims Creek are pretty much like folk anywhere else, only more interesting—at least when Randall Kenan tells their stories. Here are tales about blacks and whites, young and old, rich and poor, rural and sophisticated—stories at once grittily down to earth and soaringly fantastical.
- 1992 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
Edna O’Brien’s most personal and most powerful novel in print from Plume for the first time.
In a poignant, heart-felt exploration of one woman’s struggle to be true to herself yet hold on to the things dearest to her, award-winning author Edna O’Brien tracks the life of Nell Steadman, an innocent “country girl” desperate to gain experience in whatever manner possible. Escaping from her overbearing family into an equally stifling marriage, Nell must fight for her freedom and custody of her children.
A Thousand Acres: A Novel
- 1992 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1991 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1992 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 26.42
A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.
- 1992 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
Ursa is a well-educated, good-hearted, hard-working young black woman living in New York—a woman seeking to come to terms with herself, her life, and her parents back home in the West Indies.
