11.16.07 5:05 AM CST
• Books
• Rocky Rakovic
Here’s congratulations to two Playboy contributors who just won the National Book Award.Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke won honors for fiction. In the October issue, we reviewed the work by saying, "no longer has the stubbornly murky (Vietnam) conflict found its most resonant summations on celluloid."
Johnson (whose wife accepted the hardware) contributed the wonderful “Starlight in Idaho” for our February issue and is currently hard at work on a very interesting project that will be published in our magazine during the summer of 2008.
Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won for Young People’s (very p.c., eh?) Literature. To get a sense of his “older people’s literature” check out his essay in the current issue of Playboy. In Alexie’s “Save Me” from the “Truly, Madly, Deeply (Mostly Madly)” collection the author—who is fond of lesbians—talks about a religious/orgasmic experience at an Indigo Girls concert.
(Pictured above: Robert Hass, whose Time and Materials won the award for poetry; Cindy Lee Johnson; Sherman Alexie; and Tim Weiner, whose Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A., took the prize for nonfiction.)
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