Bookpage

 

Colum McCann won the award for fiction for Let the Great World Spin, a novel set in New York City, 1974, during Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers.

 

Of the novel, BookPage reviewer Robert Weibezahl writes, “[McCann] lends a forgiving tenderness that invigorates the timeless notion that we are not really all the different under the skin, each of us longing for love, for beauty, for those connections that will quell our loneliness.” Let the World Spin is an “enveloping new novel.”

 

The nonfiction award went to T.J. Stiles for Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

 

Phillip Hoose  won the award for young people’s literature with Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

 

In the poetry category, Keith Waldrop won for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.

 

The National Book Foundation also held a contest for “Best of the National Book Awards Fiction.” Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories won this award, beating out The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), The Stories of John Cheever and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.