Annal:2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Why Did I Ever: A Novel
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.51
After a ten-year silence, Mary Robison has emerged with a novel so beguiling and funny, it has brought her live reading audiences to their feet. Why Did I Ever? takes us along on the darkest of private journeys. The story, told by a narrator named Money Breton, is submitted like a furious and persuasive diary-a tale as fierce and taut as its fictional teller.
Forces are bearing down on Money. Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. Her grown children are in trouble. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She’s back and forth…
- 2002 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2001 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 50.52
Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it’s the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson’s disease, or maybe it’s his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn’t seem to understand a word Enid says.
Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid’s children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel…
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.51
A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory–a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life.
The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family…
- 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.52
Immortalized in folk ballads, John Henry has been a favorite American hero since the mid-nineteenth century. According to legend, John Henry, a black laborer for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, was a man of superhuman strength and stamina. He proved his mettle in a contest with a steam drill, only to die of exhaustion moments after his triumph.
In John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead transforms the simple ballad into a contrapuntal masterpiece. The narrative revolves around the story of J. Sutter, a young black journalist. Sutter is a “junketeer,” a…
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
“Refugee,” I said, pointing at my chest. “Asylum.”
When Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport late one afternoon, he has a badly faked passport and exhibits no knowledge of English beyond these two words. He was once a furniture shop owner, a husband, and a father. Now he has arrived in England seeking asylum from his native Zanzibar, using silence and claiming ignorance as his only protection. Meanwhile, Latif Mahmud, a poet and professor, lives quietly alone in his London flat, bitter about the country and family he has left behind and never revisited. When…
