2007 Quill Awards

I received an email today with the 2007 Quill Award nominees, which were announced earlier this month at BEA in New York. The Quill Awards are the self-declared "consumers choice" awards for books, sponsored by Reed Business Information and broadcast by NBC. It is the only televised book awards according to their own press, which apparently doesn't consider BookTV coverage of other book festivals. The categories I'm mainly interested in are the Debut Author of the Year and the General Fiction nominees.



For Debut Author of the Year the nominees were: Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone; Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You; This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin; The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield; Love Is a Mix Tape, by Rob Sheffield. Based on sales and Starbucks cred, it'd be hard to imagine A Long Way Gone not being the favorite in this category. It is great to see a short story collection included, and Miranda July's is certainly worthy. You can read a few of our booksellers praise it here. The Thirteenth Tale was a favorite at our shops that are big with book club readers; it seems to have potential as a metafictional mystery, which is my own personal favorite minuscule book category. I have heard good things about Love Is a Mix Tape and we should have a short review here soon. I admit I know nothing about This Is Your Brain on Music.



For General Fiction: Brothers, by Da Chen; American Youth, by Phil LaMarche; The Road, by Cormac McCarthy; Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl; Jamestown, by Matthew Sharpe. We had Da Chen and Marisha Pessl in Shorewood and you can read my post about the latter here. The Road is amazing, and I have to say I'm really surprised that it is getting the attention it has been, though it is very deserving--perhaps the most deserving. Just remember that it won the Pulitzer *before* it was an Oprah pick. Jamestown has been officially added to the books I'm going to attempt to pick up this summer, though that stack is taller than I am at the moment.

For discussion of the Business category, I recommend checking out the blog of 800-CEO-READ, by far the coolest people selling business books in the world today. (I suppose I should also disclose that they are our sister company). Click on an any of the five titles listed and you'll see what 8CR (and others, including some of today's most-relevant authors) have said about them.

I'm going to work on the alternative awards (the Flappies?), composed of books not nominated for any awards this year, but were very deserving.