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 Reeve has vowed not to have any more, the dangerous longing for the sweetness and menace of straight men.
Never at a loss for the telling detail or bitchy aside, Reeve offers a sweeping view of gay life in this century as he reconstructs the troubled world of Tom Slater (a figure inspired by the critic F. O. Matthiessen) and recalls his own insouciant youth and horny old age. Dark humor and decadent prose infuse this story of desire, betrayal, and healing.
- 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 beach and confronts the violent legacy of his father’s suicide. In “Her Real Name,” a young man navigates the tired and forgotten allegory of the American West and manages a moment of ceremonial dignity as he buries a young girl at sea. In “Jacinta,” a woman mourns her baby girl, who drowned in a tub of water left behind by evening rain. “American Bullfrog” and “Open House” are unforgettable stories of self-discovery and loss, detailing with simplicity and grace the loneliness of looking for a home…
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 nationalists, but also Ammi, founder of the Society for the Defense of the Present; Gyanendra, a pioneering pornographer; and even his own grandmother, whom he cremated long before. Stuck, like the rest of us, in a time and place not of his choosing, he does the usual things: He improvises a life and assembles a world—one bound by affection, not ideology. And as he struggles to sidestep the juggernaut that will irrevocably divide Hindus and Muslims, we discover, often with a terrible poignancy, how much of what came to be in India need not have been.
- 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, Miss Gloria Pearson, have encouraged Denise to “reach beyond her station,” and Denise begins to dread the arrival of her mother’s baby, knowing that her new responsibilities at home will mean the end of her after-school lessons in diction and grammar. Miss Pearson insists that she must educate herself—that she must learn “to speak the King’s English”—if she ever wants to be heard. If her mother succeeds in keeping her homebound, Miss Pearson warns, Denise will remain the “good little negress” the world wants her to be.
- 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 his mother that emerges in all its stark simplicity and purity.
Part eulogy and part confession, A Stone Boat is a luminous and moving evocation of the love between a son and his mother.
