Annal:1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First 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–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.43
Remember what it was like to fall in love—wildly, hopelessly in love—for the first time? Paul Kafka’s gloriously romantic debut novel recaptures love’s first days in a sparkling, bittersweet tale of awakening and longing.
Paris sets the scene for the emotional entanglements of four young Americans. Dan and Beck, just out of college, share a ramshackle garret and the friendship of Margot and Bou, two women who happen to be in love with each other. For a brief, enchanted time, the foursome revel in the bohemian splendor of the City of Light. But when loyalties shift, as they inevitably do, the friends discover the heartbreaking boundaries of intimacy. Five years later, Dan is finishing medical school in New Orleans and delivering babies at a local hospital. But memories of Paris haunt him. Where are they now—outrageous Beck, wise, steadfast Margot, impulsive, irresistible Bou? Do they think of him, and of each other? In the midnight minutes between births, Dan uses the maternity ward’s computer to write long letters to his faraway friends, conjuring up the rapture of their…
Come to Me: Stories
- 1993 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 1993 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.43
Mourning Doves: Stories
- 1993 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
Readers of The New Yorker know Judy Troy’s characters well—they’re small-town, blue-collar Americans, young and old, who look for romance at the Paradise Valley K-Mart, contemplate the universe in a trailer park, or go snake-shooting in the desert. Not much comes easily to them, even if life often holds surprises. Yet they endure, for the difficulties of just getting by in a world that sometimes seems beyond their control are offset by the healing power of love.
Together for the first time in Mourning Doves, their struggles are all the more poignant, and their pleasures, enchanting. In these stories, set in the West, the Southwest, and the South, Judy Troy conjures the marvelous from the mundane, stirring the reader without ever resorting to sentimentality. This stunning debut will delight her fans and promises to win a greater following for a rare, young talent.
Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies
- 1993 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
Mother Rocket: Stories
- 1993 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
Rita Ciresi brings us seven award-winning stories, vibrant slices of life that are at once piercing, funny, and heartbreaking.
In the title story, Ciresi weaves a tale of a New York City dancer whose spectacular sexuality and antic humor keep a life of tragedy at bay….In “The Silent Partner,” a young woman is caught up in a love affair that is both infantilizing and harrowing.…In the linked stories, “Resurrection” and “Second Coming,” we meet a piano student hopelessly in love with his alluring teacher and at the mercy of his sexually knowledgeable older brother; decades later, the brothers come together again, their relationships with their women utterly changed….And in “Pioneer Woman,” we watch a man’s dream of the ideal wife turn into the blissful nightmare of another woman’s fervent love.
Captivating, beautifully crafted, and full of the poetry and chaos of life itself, the stories in Mother Rocket solidify Rita Ciresi’s place as an exquisite storyteller and an unmatched chronicler of life as we live it today.
