Barnes & Noble Announces the Finalists for the 2009 Discover Great New Writers Awards

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced the finalists for its prestigious 2009 Discover Great New Writers Awards. The winners in each category, fiction and nonfiction, receive a $10,000 prize and a full year of additional promotion from Barnes & Noble. Second-place finalists receive $5,000, and third-place finalists, $2,500. The finalists are:

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, March 3, at a private awards ceremony. The Discover Awards honor the best works featured the previous calendar year in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program.

The Finalists

More of This World or Maybe Another is Barb Johnson’s debut, a beautifully crafted short story collection that introduces readers to a part of New Orleans far from the glittering baubles tourists collect in the French Quarter. Johnson’s characters inhabit a neighborhood so vividly portrayed, readers will swear they’ve watched a wash cycle at the Bubble and lifted a glass at the Napoleon House. Victor Lodato’s suspenseful debut novel is narrated by the eponymous Mathilda Savitch, who’s not yet old enough to censor herself to gain a friend’s approval, but demonstrates precocity in other, more frightening, ways. Playwright Lodato perfectly captures the voice of this curious protagonist, the surviving child of a small grief-stricken family. In All the Living, Kentuckian C. E. Morgan’s debut novel, Aloma, a young woman, leaves the orphanage where she has spent her youth to live with her boyfriend, Orren. Though they’ve shared some ecstatic, passionate moments, their new life is filled with uncomfortable silences, hard labor, and unspoken grief. A haunting novel about love, choice, and commitment, it has the feel of a timeless classic.

Columbine is journalist Dave Cullen’s first book, ten years in the making. One of the first journalists on-site after the tragedy that devastated this community in Littleton, Colorado, Cullen’s expert research and interviewing skills take what we thought we knew about this historic event and turn it upside down. The Fourth Part of the World is Toby Lester’s fascinating world tour, in pursuit of the history of a map that helped shape the world as we know it, including mesmerizing forays into the lives of missionaries, adventurers, mariners, poets, and mapmakers. Neil White’s sentence for check-kiting earned him more than some time to pore over his misdeeds – it provided an exceptional opportunity to record his interactions with the residents of the last remaining leper colony in the United States. In his moving memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, White experiences a transformation – not only from free man to captive, but from a man obsessed with appearances to one fully able to cherish what’s beneath the skin.

The Jurists

Two panels of distinguished literary jurists (each of whom was selected for the Discover program earlier in their careers) selected the finalists and will select the winners. Serving as this year’s fiction jurists are Kathryn Harrison, the author of numerous books, including the novels Thicker Than Water, Envy, and The Seal Wife, and the memoirs The Kiss and The Mother Knot; Stewart O’Nan, the author of a dozen novels, including Snow Angels, Last Night at the Lobster, and A Prayer for the Dying, among other books; and fiction writer David Schickler, the author of Kissing in Manhattan and Sweet and Vicious.

This year’s nonfiction judges include Lee Martin, author of the memoirs, From Our House and Turning the Bones, and several works of fiction, including The Bright Forever, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Rachel Simon, whose works include a novel, The Magic Touch, and two memoirs, Riding the Bus with My Sister, and Building a Home with My Husband; and Danielle Trussoni, whose memoir, Falling Through the Earth, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the New York Times, and whose first novel, Angelology, will be published in March.

The Discover Awards

The Discover Great New Writers program was established 20 years ago to highlight works of exceptional literary quality that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book marketplace. This year’s selections featured the work of 58 new and previously underappreciated writers. Submissions to the program are read and discussed by a group of Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection for the program’s seasonal promotions. Recent winners of the annual Discover Great New Writers Award include David Sheff for Beautiful Boy, Gin Phillips for The Well and the Mine; Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (2007), Kate Braestrup for Here If You Need Me (2007), Ben Fountain for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006), Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts of No Nation (2005), Nathaniel Fick for One Bullet Away (2005), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals (2004), and Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000).

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 775 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 636 college bookstores serving nearly 4 million students and over 250,000 faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is the nation’s top bookseller brand for the sixth year in a row, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality, and purchase intent; the top bookseller in quality for the second year in a row and the number two retailer in trust, according to the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features hundreds of thousands of titles in its eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks). Customers can buy and read eBooks on a wide range of platforms, including the iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry® smartphones, as well as most Windows® and Mac® laptops or full-sized desktop computers.

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