Annal:1994 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1994 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1994 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.44
With the publication of the Recognitions in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, J R (winner of the National Book Award) and Carpenter’s Gothic, have secured his position among America’s foremost contemporary writers.
Now A Frolic of His Own, his long-anticipated fourth novel, adds more luster to his reputation, as he takes on life in our litigious times. “Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” So begins this mercilessly funny,…
- 1994 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
Few writers have been as enthusiastically hailed as was Ellen Currie when her short fiction first appeared in The New Yorker and other publications in the late 1950s. Twenty-five years later, her first novel, Available Light, appeared—and, as critics and readers were quick to assert, was well worth the wait.
With Moses Supposes, Currie renews her reputation as a peerless chronicler of the free-floating malice and unintended comedy of domestic life. In the title story, a young newlywed’s unexpected pregnancy makes her marriage suddenly,…
- 1994 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
The Bird Artist, Howard Norman’s spellbinding new novel, is set in Newfoundland in 1911. Fabian Vas’s story, told with disarming simplicity and grace, takes place against a spare and profoundly beautiful landscape where the most powerful of emotions stand out starkly against naked rock, sea and sky. At age twenty, Fabian is working at the boat yard, taking a correspondence course in bird painting, and sleeping with Margaret Handle, a woman of great beauty, intelligence and waywardness—though his parents are determined to marry him to a distant relation he…
- 1995 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1994 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.45
At long last, here are all of Grace Paley’s classic stories collected in one volume. From her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1959, to Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), Grace Paley’s quirky, boisterous characters and rich use of language have won her readers’ hearts and secured her place as one of America’s most accomplished writers. Grace Paley’s stories are united by her signature interweaving of personal and political truths, by her extraordinary capacity for empathy, and by her pointed, funny…
- 1994 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
Michael Killigan, a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa, is missing. The search for him is launched separately by his father, Randall, a master-of-the-universe and warlord of the Indianapolis bankruptcy courts, and Michael’s best friend, Boone Westfall. Once in Freetown, Boone falls in with Sam Lewis, an unscrupulous Volunteer who’s fed up with Sierra Leone, a country which in 1992 earned the distinction of being the world’s worst place to live, according to the United Nations. Lewis leads Boone into the bush and turns him over to Aruna Sisay, “the white Mende…
