Annal:2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Assorted Fire Events: Stories
- 2000 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.5
In just a few years David Means has emerged as one of the most distinct voices of his generation, producing superbly generous stories that-like the work of his predecessors Raymond Carver and Alice Munro-push the form to a new level. Bringing together Means’s unforgettable characters and plots in diamond-cutter prose, Assorted Fire Events is a major literary event.
From a married man consummating a hazy summer affair and getting lost in a reverie that explains the “far-away look in his eyes” (“Coitus”) to a recently widowed mother who must decide what to do…
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- 2001 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2001 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2001 Spectrum shortlist
- 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 34.51
It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn’s own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that…
- 2001 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.51
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it’s not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past - a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where,…
- 2001 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.51
Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he’s haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young…
- 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.5
Peter Ho Davies’s award-winning debut collection, The Ugliest House in the World, drew comparisons to the work of Raymond Carver, James Joyce, and V. S. Naipaul. The Washington Post hailed it as “astounding…Davies has left a unique, definitive footprint in the soil of contemporary short fiction.”
In his new collection, Davies’s unforgettable characters—a Chinese son gambling with professional mourners, a mixed-race couple who experience a close encounter—strive for a love that transcends time, race, and sexuality. These are the stories of a…
