Now is the moment you've all been expecting for the last week or so (at least, I wish you were). I've mulled it over and over in my mind and chose the eight winners of the 2013 Dead End Follies Awards. I may or may not have overlooked certain titles. In the following case, I apologize. There were too many great titles to choose from this year and if yours wasn't nominated or didn't win an award, it's not because it wasn't a quality book.
Before I declare the winners, I want to announce I've started compiling my movie viewings for the first Dead End Follies Movie Awards, due next year. Now, without further ado...
WINNER FOR BEST BOOK COVER
For its originality, narrative accuracy and striking composition. Thriller readers would pick it up whether it was great or terrible.
WINNER FOR BEST SHORT STORY
THIS TOO SHALL PASS by Steve Weddle, in COUNTRY HARDBALL
For its breathtaking realism and its understanding of the beauty, complexity and frail nature of a moment. An immersive experience within a few pages.
WINNER FOR BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION
For its keen depiction of despair and alienation in rural land. No one wrote with the gracefulness and understatement like Weddle did in 2013.
WINNER FOR BEST NEW BOOK (published in 2013)
DONNYBROOK, by Frank Bill
This category was close, but for Frank Bill's boldness and creative approach in rethinking crime fiction as a contemporary equivalent of epic poetry. It is a thoroughly unique object.
WINNER FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL
For the absolute purity of its dialogues, the cleverness of its form and the precision of its characterization. It is a novel that have survived and will survive for several years.
WINNER FOR BEST LITERARY NOVEL
For its essential, relatively simple presentation of Wallace's ideas. Freed of classic structure, the novel becomes an immense, multilayered success.
WINNER FOR BEST NEW WRITER (discovery)
For his uncanny capacity to demostrate a multidimensional approach in a simple, overly-formatted story genre. Sayles writes fearlessly, but more important, he writes deceptively cerebral stories.
WINNER FOR BEST NOVEL
For creating a magnificent intimacy with the reader and for its idiosyncratic approach that mimicks what it might've been like to have a conversation with Wallace himself. No other work translated his voice on the page with such purity.