The Morning News

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Currently: "I am old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised." http://tmne.ws/14845
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Edited by Kate Schlegel

Reader Mail

January 21, 2010
I’m a great fan of your Tournament and I follow it assiduously each year. This year you note that at least one National Book Award judge “flipped” a coin in his or her decision. Since I’m the unofficial historian of the National Book Awards, can you tell me who that was? Then I’d be happy to let people know that that judge (or those judges) flipped a coin to make a decision.

Harold Augenbraum
Executive Director
National Book Foundation
Presenter of the National Book Awards

ToB Commissioner Kevin Guilfoile responds: Ha! Yeah, no, we don’t actually know an individual who helped determine the eventual National Book Award winner by actually flipping a literal (or literary) coin. We were thinking about it more in the cognitive sense where you have all these books that are sort of equally deserving in different ways, and so you pick one arbitrarily and then you make up a rationalization for why you did. It happens all the time in the Tournament of Books.

It should be said, if it’s not obvious, that we are also followers and admirers of the National Book Award. In fact, it was the desire to see more of the book award sausage being made that inspired us to create a sort of open-kitchen book award of our own. That and general wise-assery, of which we have a surplus, unfortunately.

And let be known throughout the land: You kid the National Book Award and the National Book Award will kid you back.

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