Criticism
Laura Miller, writing in Salon (Oct 12, 2011), said the fiction award has became a Newbery Medal for adults: Good for you whether you like it or not. She said "the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention.. the nominated books exhibit qualities — a poetic prose style, elliptical or fragmented storytelling — that either don’t matter much to nonprofessional readers, or even put them off." She claims the NBA has become irrelevant to average readers and of more interest to professional writers. Craig Fehrman, writing in The New York Times (October 28, 2011), said "the National Book Awards known for this sort of thing. They're awards for insiders."
In response to these criticisms, the award "has been taking a tough look at itself, hiring a consultant to survey industry insiders — booksellers, editors and even critics — to see if the award process itself needs to be reformed to attract more attention."
Read more about this topic: National Book Award
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)