Man Gone Down wins International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest literary prize, was recently awarded from an international longlist of 147 titles, nominated by libraries around the world, to Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas.

The judges said of this book, "We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas' masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner . . . is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth." Sounds like an oustanding book group choice to me!

This is what it says about Man Gone Down in our catalog: "beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth. On the eve of the unnamed narrator's thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his family afloat, four days to try to make some sense of his life. He's been getting by working construction jobs though he's known on the streets as "the professor," as he was expected to make something out of his life. Alternating between his past--as a child in inner-city Boston, he was bussed to the suburbs as part of the doomed attempts at integration in the 1970s--and the preset in New York City where he is trying mightily to keep his children in private schools, we learn of his mother's abuses, his father's abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is an extraordinary debut. It is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life--and the urge to escape that sentence. Michael Thomas's writing recalls some of the great American masters, including Ralph Ellison, but his debut is wholly and distinctly an original. Man Gone Down is a dazzling addition to the literature of and about America today."

We also own at HCPL the audiobook version of Man Gone Down.

Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao shortlisted for another award

Bloomberg.com reported on April 2nd that the shortlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award includes Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics' Circle award. Find this book in our catalog. The book was selected as one of eight finalists.

Billed as the richest award for a work of fiction in English and first awarded in 1996, the IMPAC award is meant to promote excellence in world literature. The contest is managed by Dublin City Libraries and draws on nominations from librarians around the globe. This year’s 146 nominations came from 157 public library systems in 117 cities worldwide, the organizers said in an e-mailed news release. Click here for details.



This is what the summary in our catalog says about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: "This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time."