Annal:1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.45
Reeve thinks his life is over: his career is at a dead end, his face is a mess, and his landlord is evicting him from his apartment because he made too much noise when a hustler beat him up. As he lies in his hospital bed, trying to figure out what to do next, he finds himself brooding about the parallel ruin of his comrade and mentor Tom Slater, a famous American literary scholar who dabbled in communism and was driven to suicide during the McCarthy era. And there is the further distraction of the patient in the next bed, a silent youth who arouses feelings…
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
Charles D’Ambrosio’s work is full of light and humor even in its darkest visions: these are stories of sorrow and mercy, of people struggling to wrest meaning from the tragedies that hover over their lives. All have reached a point from which there can be no true return, and it is in this moment of destruction and renewal—with the world they’ve known collapsing eerily behind them—that D’Ambrosio’s characters begin their perilous crossing from knowledge into forgiveness.
The wise-beyond-his-years narrator of the title story guides a drunk woman home along the…
Looking Through Glass: A Novel
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
Looking Through Glass is a powerful and immensely entertaining novel set in the troubled 1940s—the era of India’s partition and independence. Its narrator is our contemporary, an ambitious young photographer properly unconcerned with history. But history makes him her own—in a literal way—when he finds himself suddenly transported into the deep end of 1942. His involuntary odyssey through a crumbling Raj takes him from Muslim neighborhoods and coffee shops to Hindu wrestling academies to colonial enclaves of viceregal splendor. He meets change-mongering…
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1996 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.47
It is 1963, and young Denise Palms, reared in rural Virginia by her grandmother, has just rejoined her mother, new stepfather, and two older brothers in Detroit. Denise is an ordinary, intelligent negro girl in a not unusual negro family, which means that she is expected to cook and clean house, go to school, and take care of her mother’s baby when it comes. In this groundbreaking debut, A. J. Verdelle tells the story of Denise’s family—a story filtered through the perspective of Denise’s vibrant, maturing intelligence. Studies with an uncompromising new teacher,…
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
Andrew Solomon tells an exquisitely perceptive story of family, identity, and the changes wrought by grief and loss. Harry, an internationally celebrated concert pianist, arrives in Paris to confront his glamorous mother about his homosexuality. Instead, he discovers that she is terminally ill. In an attempt to escape his feelings of guilt and depression at the prospect of her death, he embarks on a series of intense love affairs that force him to question his sexual identity. But as time runs out and tragedy looms closer, it is the relationship between Harry and…
