Annal:1993 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Shipping News: A Novel
- 1994 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1993 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1993 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 26.44
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx’s genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair…features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of…
Come to Me: Stories
- 1993 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 1993 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.43
This fresh and stunning collection of stories takes the reader deep into the heart of the most alarming and joyful human relationships.
- 1993 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
In the pediatrics ward of a public hospital in the heart of Angel City, a group of sick children is gathering. An Asian boat girl, a freakishly aging boy, a child born with no face: they share nothing but their desperation and the journey they know lies ahead of them. The surrogate parents of this band—surgical resident Richard Kraft, overworked to the point of collapse, and therapist Linda Espera, awash with idealism—are charged with keeping these strays alive on make-believe alone. The anthology of story-cures to which the ward pins its hopes doubles back…
The Pugilist at Rest: Stories
- 1993 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
Thom Jones’s stories strike with a profound and devastating impact. His vision of the human condition is almost brutal, for in ithe world of Jones’s fiction there is such a preponderance of darkness that light itself becomes a form of torture. Yet each story in this collection is infused with the surprising, perhaps even ennobling grace of the spirit that ought to collapse, but cannot.
Swimming in the Volcano: A Novel
- 1993 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
Bob Shacochis returns to the setting of his first collection of stories with Swimming in the Volcano, a haunting and evocative novel possessed of the same beauty as the places and people of the Caribbean.
Set on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Catherine, an American expatriate becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially explosive scene enters a woman once loved and lost, but who remains a powerful temptation—one that proves impossible to resist.
At once an enchanting love…
