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Oklahoma writer, Nimrod judge up for National Book Award
Published: 10/15/2008 12:24 PM
Last Modified: 10/15/2008 12:24 PM

Oklahoma author Tim Tharp, whose books include "Falling Dark" and "Knights of the Hill Country," is one of the nominees for the 2008 National Book Awards.

Tharp is up for his young-adult novel, "The Spectacular Now" -- an impressive thing, as the book won't be offiicially published until Nov. 11 -- eight days before the National Book Awards will be announced.

But that has happened before with this award -- Tom Wolfe's novel "A Man in Full" received a nomination before it was officially released to the world.

So it seems a pretty good bet that Tharp's "The Spectacular Now" may well be, well, pretty spectacular.

This is Tharp's second young-adult novel, following the highly acclaimed "Knights of the Hill Country."

If you're planning on attending the events this weekend hosted by Nimrod International Journal -- the Nimrod Awards dinner on Friday, and the Conference for Readers and Writers on Saturday, both at TU -- be sure to congratulate Mark Doty for his National Book Award nomination.

Doty, who served as poetry judge for this year's Nimrod Literary Awards, was nominated for his book "Fire To Fire: New and Selected Poems."

The full list of nominees is below:

Fiction:
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (FSG)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf)

Nonfiction:
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Harcourt)

Poetry:
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (FSG)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State Univ.)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

Young People's Literature:
Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Knopf)

And you can watch a video of the announcement of the nominees here:

Scott Turow announces nominees

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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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Past Articles By James D. Watts Jr

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