Annal:1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1993 LATimes–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.43
When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen and her mother’s belief in her lead to a man’s dramatic rescue. But Turtle’s moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her mother, Taylor, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past.
A deeply felt novel of love despite the risks, of tearing apart and coming together, Pigs in Heaven travels the roads from rural Kentucky and the Urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation. Along the way it introduces a vivid cast of characters, including Jax, Taylor’s insecure boyfriend, who plays in a band called the Irascible Babies; Barbie, a perky young woman who has modeled her life on Barbie the doll, except for her habit of crime; Alice, Taylor’s mother, who is on the verge of leaving a silent husband whose idea of partnership in marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks; and Annawake Fourkiller, an idealistic young…
William Trevor: The Collected Stories
- 1993 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
From his debut collection, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, published in 1968, to Family Sins (1990), William Trevor has crafted the short story to perfection, giving us brilliant and subtle stories full of the reversals, surprises, and shadowy truths we discover in life itself. To read this volume is not just to encounter an extraordinary literary stylist, but to understand life as surely as though we were looking through the eyes of his protagonists and—deeper still—into their hearts.
William Trevor: The Collected Stories includes the tales from his seven previous books, as well as four stories that have never appeared in book form in America. They depict the comforts and frustrations of life in rural Ireland, the complexities of family relationships, and the elusive grace of love. They portray the almost invisible strands that bind people to each other as well as the chains that imprison them in solitary yearning.
- 1993 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
This witty companion to Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot’s light-footed masterpiece, traces the vagaries of a young woman’s life as it begins to duplicate the surprising gyrations of an eighteenth-century lascivious novel she has uncovered. Along the path of temptation, love, lust, folly, and reconciliation through the sophisticated labyrinth of contemporary Manhattan, we join this delightful young Candida on her cockeyed quest for truth.
Margaret Nathan is the scholarly though mortifyingly forgetful author of The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, an unlikely best seller celebrated by feminists and by deconstructionists, and soon to be a television movie. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical Columbia professor, Margaret seems blessed—until she finds herself seduced by the libertine novel she has discovered in the library. Thus begins a series of amorous contretemps that plunge Margaret into the maelstrom of contemporary sexual practice, until she is washed up panting on the farther shore of self-understanding.
A screwball comedy of ideas, Rameau’s Niece is insightful,…
The Burning Glass: Stories
- 1993 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
The burning glass of the title of Helen Norris’ third book of short fiction is an archaic expression for the magnifying glass, and the metaphor is entirely appropriate. For a burning glass not only makes small things large, but focused long and precisely enough, it sets the magnified object on fire. And indeed, these nine superb stories are illuminated by the incandescence of words—and hearts—set ablaze.
- 1993 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
With insight and intelligence, Sue Miller explores the intricates of family and love.
Lottie Gardner, her brother, Cameron, and their childhood friend Elizabeth have all come together in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after years of separation. Lottie is barraged with memories of the past as she packs up her mother’s house and witnesses the rekindling of an old romance between Cameron and Elizabeth. When a senseless tragedy intrudes upon them, Lottie is forced to examine the consequences of what she has done for love.
