There are a lot of contests out there, some of them more serious than others. Here’s one that is on the nonserious side: the oddest book title.

Among the nominees this year is “How Green Were the Nazis.”

And, yes, you — dear readers — get a chance to vote. Scroll to the bottom for the link.

Here’s more from the AP:

`How Green Were the Nazis?” could be the title to beat this year for the
Bookseller/Diagram Prize for oddest book title.

The book by Thomas Zeller, Franz-Josef Bruggemeier and Mark Cioc is billed as the first to
examine the environmental policies of the Third Reich. It is published by Ohio University
Press.

Other nominees announced Friday:

“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: a guide to field identification,” by
Julian Montague.

“Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan,” by Robert Chenciner, Gabib
Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie.

“Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream, Di Mascio of Coventry, an Ice Cream Company of Repute,
With an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans,” by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis
Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson.

“Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium.”

“Better Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence,” by David Benatar.

The winner will be chosen by the public. You can vote online at http://www.thebookseller.com. The prize will be announced on April 13.

Last year’s winner was “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It,” by Gary Leon Hill.

Go here to vote in the poll www.thebookseller.com.

The National Book Critics Circle has announced its winners for the previous year in six categories. Here’s the link to Critical Mass, the NBCC blog.

Here’s what the AP’s Hillel Italie had to say:

Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss,” a narrative of global discovery
and displacement that has already won the Man Booker Prize, received another literary honor
Thursday night: the National Book Critics Circle fiction award.

“To be claimed by the place in which you live means so much,” said Desai, a native of
India who now lives in New York.

The daughter of author Anita Desai, she worried about the “perverse” luck of her book,
although she was clearly prepared to win, reciting a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Boast of
Quietness,” which reads, in part, “More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily
covetous multitude.”

Six prizes and two honorary awards were handed out at the 33rd annual critics award
ceremony. Simon Schama’s “Rough Crossings,” a history of slaves who fought with the British
during the Revolutionary War, won for general nonfiction. Julie Phillips’ was the biography
winner for “James Tiptree, Jr.,” the pen name for science fiction author Alice B. Sheldon.

Phillips, who took 10 years to complete her book, accepted the award by quoting Sheldon,
who committed suicide in 1987: “Life is fair. Some people have talent; other people get
prizes.”

Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost,” a memoir of six family members lost in the Holocaust, won
for autobiography. Troy Jollimore’s “Tom Thomson in Purgatory,” a debut collection, was a
surprise for poetry, chosen over such celebrated finalists as W.D. Snodgrass, Frederick Seidel
and the late Miltos Sachtouris.

“I’m stunned, and I may not be the only one,” said Jollimore, who smiled and shook his
head in disbelief when he heard his name announced as the winner.

The criticism prize went to Lawrence Weschler’s “Everything That Rises,” which beat out,
among others, Bruce Bawer’s controversial “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is
Destroying the West from Within,” a book that even members of the NBCC have called racist and
anti-Muslim.

Steven G. Kellman, whose work has appeared in The Texas Observer, The Georgia Review and
other publications, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Longtime
critic John Leonard, who has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and
The Nation among others, won the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award.

Hundreds gathered at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in downtown Manhattan at a time
when critics have been reminded yet again of their precarious status, with the Los Angeles
Times expected soon to cut its Sunday review section and combine it with the Saturday opinion
pages, a day of lower circulation.

In accepting his honorary award, Leonard joked about appearing before “a roomful of people
so innocent of the profit motive.” The head of the book critics circle, John Freeman, began
the evening by noting the trend of shrinking review coverage and reminding the audience … who
needed little reminding … that criticism was a kind of “Ellis Island” for culture, a
passageway for the best writing.

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, has nearly 500 members. There are no
cash prizes, but a great deal of prestige. A solid majority of nominees showed up, including
such high-profile writers as novelists Richard Ford and Dave Eggers and historian Taylor
Branch.

Since 1998, The Annual Asian American Literary Awards have honored Asian American writers for excellence in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, memoir, stage plays and screenplays. Literary awards recipients are determined by a national panel of judges who are selected on the basis of expertise in a literary genre and/or experience in academic environments relevant to Asian American literature; residence in the U.S. and ethnic background as to create a diverse committee.

To qualify for our next award, a work must have been written by an individual of Asian descent living in the United States and published originally in English during the calendar year preceding the award year (for example, works published in 2004 are eligible for the 2005 Literary Awards). No self-published works will be considered. Award submissions are accepted in Spring, with award recipients announced in Fall, and publicly presented during our Winter awards ceremony.

More info is here:

http://www.aaww.org/aaww_awards.html

MARY GORDON WINS THE STORY PRIZE for her collection,
The Stories of Mary Gordon

New York, NY — The Stories of Mary Gordon, published in 2006 by Pantheon Books, is the winner of The Story Prize, as announced at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City on February 28. Two other books—The Lives of Rocks (Houghton Mifflin) by Rick Bass and In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead Books) by George Saunders—were contenders for the award. At the event on Wednesday night, the three finalists read from their books and discussed their work onstage with Larry Dark, the Director of The Story Prize, before Founder Julie Lindsey announced the winner at the end of the program.

Gordon received $20,000—the largest first-prize amount of any annual U.S. book award for fiction—and an engraved silver bowl. The other two finalists, Bass and Saunders, each received $5,000.

Written over the course of thirty years, The Stories of Mary Gordon collects twenty-two new stories and nineteen that appeared in a previous collection, Temporary Shelter. Mary Gordon is also the author of six novels, including Final Payments and Pearl; four books of nonfiction, including The Shadow Man; and a collection of novellas, The Rest of Life. Her short stories have twice been first-prize winners in the O. Henry Awards and she is the recipient of numerous other honors, among them an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

Established in 2004, The Story Prize annually honors the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction. Eligibility is restricted to
collections (containing at least two stories and/or novellas) by a
living author, written in English. Eligible books must be the first
publication of the work in the U.S. during a calendar year, in either
hardcover or paperback, available for purchase by the general public. Collections must also include work previously unpublished in book form.

The Director of The Story Prize, Larry Dark, served as Series Editor for six volumes of the annual Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards from 1997 to 2002 and has edited four other anthologies of short fiction. A fifteen-member Advisory Board, including prominent members of the literary community, offers support and advice to The Story Prize. The award was established by founder Julie Lindsey and is underwritten by a private donor.

The three finalists for The Story Prize were selected by Dark and
Lindsey from among 65 books entered for consideration in 2006,
representing 44 different publishers and imprints. Three judges read the books chosen as finalists to determine the winner of The Story Prize.

The judges were:

—Edwidge Danticat, an award-winning fiction writer and the first winner of The Story Prize for her 2005 collection of connected stories, The Dew Breaker (Knopf).
—Ron Hogan, of the literary blogs Beatrice.com and Galleycat, which covers the publishing industry.
—Mitchell Kaplan, an independent bookseller, past American Booksellers Association president, and founder of the Miami, Fla., area Books & Books stores.

Aspiring writers —

I’ve recently heard about this writing contest. Even though it comes out of Albuquerque and has the name “SouthWest” in it, it is a national contest open to all writers. For details about what genres are being accepted and entry fees, check out the Web site.

From the Web site, http://southwestwriters.com/index.php:

The 2007 SouthWest Writers Contest encourages and honors excellence in writing.

Editors and literary agents judge all entries in each category and critique the top three. All entries receive a written critique by a qualified consultant.

Highly qualified new critiquers have been selected for three categories in this year’s contest: Mainstream or Literary Novel, Screenplay, and Poetry.

Finalists are notified by mail and listed on the SWW website with the title of their entry.

First, second and third place winners receive cash prizes of $150, $100 and $50, respectively.

First place winners also compete for the $1000 Storyteller Award.

on WNYC public radio’s Philip Lopate show. The link is here:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2007/02/27

The winner of the Story Prize — for the top collection of short stories published in 2006 — will be announced tonight.

The Story Prize will be returning to the New School’s Tishman Auditorium on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. for our third annual awards event.

The three authors chosen as Story Prize finalists will read brief selections from their books and then sit down with Larry Dark, the Director of The Story Prize, to discuss their work onstage. The readings will provide the audience with a taste of the nominated books, while the onstage interviews will provide insight into the creative process of the finalists. The evening will culminate with the announcement of the winner and presentation of the $20,000 award and the engraved silver bowl given to the winner of The Story Prize. The runners-up will receive $5,000 each.

The Story Prize is an annual book award for short story collections written in English and published in the U.S. during a calendar year. Finalists chosen from among books published in 2006 will be announced during the second week of January, 2007. Ticket information and a short list of other highly recommended books of short fiction published in 2006 will be posted on our Web site, www.thestoryprize.org, at the time of the announcement, so be sure to stay tuned.

The Kiriyama Prize Web site lists the finalists in fiction and nonfiction. Included on the list is Haruki Murakami’s Dublin prize-winning collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and Kiran Desia’s Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss.

Details here:

About the fiction finalists

India in the 1980s, at the beginning of the Nepalese movement for an independent state, is the tumultuous backdrop for Kiran Desai’s richly textured, Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss. Chinese dissident author Ma Jian’s slender but powerful book of stories set in Tibet, Stick Out Your Tongue, follows the author’s earlier Kiriyama Prize nomination for the nonfiction memoir Red Dust (2001), making Ma Jian the second author (following Luis Alberto Urrea) to be recognized by the Prize judges for both fiction and nonfiction. World-class author and Japanese icon Haruki Murakami dishes out 24 surreal, complex, and often very funny short stories in his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. In Canadian author Madeleine Thien’s intricately and intelligently constructed first novel Certainty, a producer of radio documentaries in Vancouver unravels the mystery of her parents’ past in Asia. In the darkly beautiful novel Behold the Many, seasoned author and brilliant linguistic stylist Lois-Ann Yamanaka gives us the story of three outcast sisters in turn-of-the-century Hawai’i.

About the nonfiction finalists

Abigail Friedman’s The Haiku Apprentice offers haiku-like, fleeting, but significant glimpses at Japanese culture in a lovingly published volume from Stone Bridge Press. Another small press title gracing the nonfiction shortlist is Blonde Indian, the moving memoir of Ernestine Hayes, who grew up in a Tlingit community in Alaska. The New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, co-authored by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, chronicles mountaineer Mortenson’s adventurous efforts to build a school for a small village inhabited by the Balti (an Islamic ethnic group) in a remote corner of Pakistan. The great granddaughter of famed naturalist Charles Darwin, Ruth Padel, is a finalist for her Tigers in Red Weather—a paean to the charismatic tiger, a plea to save them from extinction, and a fascinating look at different cultures’ relationship to the animal. And finally, journalist John Pomfret’s thoughtful Chinese Lessons gives voice to the author’s classmates during his studies as a foreign exchange student at Nanjing University and follows the students’ stories from the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s to the present day.

What is the Kiriyama Prize?

The Kiriyama Prize was established in 1996 to recognize outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia that encourage greater mutual understanding of and among the peoples and nations of this vast and culturally diverse region. The Prize consists of a cash award of US $30,000, which is split equally between the fiction and nonfiction winners.

From the AP:

Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality.

“It’s such a slim volume,” PEN/Faulkner judge Debra Magpie Earling said Monday in a statement, “and the book haunts me, its simplicity and brutishness, the unflinching look at life. Roth never looks away, never trivialises, never shrugs. He manages to wrestle with grief, the immensity of losing self.”

The runners-up were Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Dead Fish Museum, Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes, Amy Hempel’s The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel and Edward P Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Roth, who will receive $15,000, is the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner, having received it in 1994 for Operation Shylock and in 2001 for The Human Stain. The PEN/Faulkner Award was founded in 1980.