This October, the National Book Foundation will announce the 2010 finalists for the National Book Award at the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia. (The foundation has not yet announced who will read the list of 20 finalists in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature.)
In past years, John Grisham has made the announcement from William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has named the finalists from City Lights Book Shop in San Francisco, Garrison Keillor from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Camille Paglia from the Library Company of Philadelphia.
The foundation's choice of Flannery O'Connor's childhood home (included in A LITERARY GUIDE TO FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S GEORGIA) comes in the wake of last summer's campaign to determine the Best of the National Book Award winners in fiction, with all 77 past winners in the running. Public vote selected Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories, which won the National Book Award in 1972 -- eight years after her death -- beating out finalists John Updike and Walker Percy.
