Annal:2008 Anthony Award for Best Critical Work

From AwardAnnals

Results of the Anthony Award in the year 2008. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

<–2007
Anthony Award
–end–

Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, Charles Foley

This remarkable annotated collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s previously unpublished private correspondence offers unique insight into one of the world’s most popular authors. For the first time, Conan Doyle emerges from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, revealing a man whose character and exploits rival that of his famous creation. In particular, Conan Doyle’s correspondence with his mother exposes his endless search for fulfillment and success outside the Holmes stories.

Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction

Christiana Gregoriou

2008 Anthony-Critical nominee
2008 Edgar-Critical/Biography nominee
Score: 12.58

This book directly explores the three aspects of deviance that contemporary American crime fiction manipulates: linguistic, social, and generic. Gregoriou conducts case studies into crime series by James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, and investigates the way in which these novelists correspondingly challenge linguistic norms, the boundaries of acceptable social behavior, and the relevant generic conventions.

The Essential Mystery Lists

Roger M. Sobin

2008 Anthony-Critical nominee
2008 Macavity-Nonfiction nominee
Score: 12.58

Roger M. Sobin has compiled the quintessential guide for mystery readers and collectors. The work contains lists of the major mystery awards throughout the world. Sobin has provided winners and nominees for nearly every award, organizing them in an easy-to-navigate volume complete with checklists. The volume will also contain the results from the 2007 Anthony Awards.

The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction

Patrick Anderson

2008 Anthony-Critical nominee
2008 Edgar-Critical/Biography nominee
Score: 12.58

There’s been a revolution in American popular fiction. The writers who dominated the bestseller lists a generation ago with blockbuster novels about movie stars and exotic foreign lands have been replaced by a new generation writing a new kind of bestseller, one that hooks readers with crime, suspense, and ever-increasing violence. Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post’s man on the thriller beat, calls this revolution “the triumph of the thriller,” and lists among its stars Thomas Harris, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Sue Grafton, and Elmore Leonard.

In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today’s popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are—and the worst. Most of all, Anderson demands that the best of these novelists be given their due—not as genre writers, but as some ofthe most talented men and women at work in American fiction. Don’t trust the literary elites to tell you what to read, he warns—make up you own minds.