IPPY ENTRANTS EXPRESS DIVERSE VIEWPOINTS
Congratulations and sincere thanks to the over 1,500 independent authors and publishers who participated in the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards. This year, a total of 3,175 entries were submitted from 49 U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces, and 16 countries overseas.
The medal-winning books listed herein come from 44 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands; 7 Canadian provinces; and 5 countries overseas.
These books come not only from diverse locations, but also diverse personalities and viewpoints. This year’s Current Events category, always a hot bed of political and social discourse, was filled with impassioned pleas for attention to a wide variety of causes, from energy conservation to political activism.
In Peak Everything (New Society Press), author Richard Heinberg warns: “Once we accept that energy, fresh water, and food will become less freely available over the next few decades, it is hard to escape the conclusion that while the 20th century saw the greatest and most rapid expansion of the scale, scope, and complexity of human societies in history, the 21st will see contraction and simplification. The only real question is whether societies will contrast and simplify intelligently or in an uncontrolled, chaotic fashion.”
In his introduction to The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press), Bryan Caplan states that, “Democracies frequently adopt and maintain policies harmful for most people,” and then suggests how this Paradox of Democracy might be understood. “One answer is that the people’s ‘representatives’ have turned the tables on them. Elections might be a weaker deterrent to misconduct than they seem on the surface, making it more important to please special interests than the general public. A second answer, which complements the first, is that voters are deeply ignorant about politics. They do not know who their representatives are, much less what they do. This tempts politicians to pursue personal agendas and sell themselves to donors.”
It’s an election year, so books about political strategy abound, and commentator Thom Hartmann reminds us in Cracking the Code (Berrett-Koehler) of the importance of storytelling, even during high-stakes electioneering and campaigning: “Stories are powerful. If you want people to understand your point, and to remember it for a long time, embed the information in a story.” Will the presidential candidate who does the best storytelling prevail this November?
This year’s fiction category winners were a diverse group in many ways. Literary Fiction gold medalist Amity Gaige is in her thirties; silver medalist Millard Kaufman is 91. Kaufman’s novel begins in an Iraqi prison; Peter Kocan wrote his bronze medal-winning book in an Australian prison, where he’s serving a life sentence for a political assassination attempt. Our Popular Fiction winners covered cheerier topics: baseball, pet adoration, bibliophilia, and the Wild West.
Many of this year’s fiction entries were unusually daring and experimental, and we awarded our Storyteller of the Year medals to three of the most audacious. Monica Drake’s Clown Girl (Hawthorne Books) chronicles the antics of a kids’ party rent-a-clown; Ara 13’s Drawers & Booths (CovingtonMoore) follows a U.S. military reporter in and out of war zones; Stephen T. Savage’s Splattery (iUniverse) is a hip-hoppy rap on the life of crime. An excerpt:
Spoiler alert…I’ve got some news. Hot off the press. Front page, about the fold. Truth be told. I confess. I spoiled The Wheeler. Rotten. Tag, you’re split. On a whim—with vim, and vigor. With my hair trigger. Rigor mortis. A prima facial. For The Wheeler. Control. Alt. Delete. The wild hare, spoiled the tortoise. To smithereens. This hate machine. Got mean. And then some. Splattery. Verbatim. In the first degree.
This year’s Award-winning memoirs came from very diverse points of view, some dealing with relationships, such as Tim Phelan’s Romance, Riches and Restrooms (iUniverse) about the relationship difficulties caused by his acutely irritable bowels. Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups (Arsenal Pulp Press) explains in mouth-watering detail how her mother’s Ukrainian cooking soothed the pain of her romantic failures – and includes some of the most heart-mending recipes. In Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer (The University of Arizona Press) Richard Shelton writes about his decision to teach poetry to Arizona State Prison inmates: “Although that choice has led me to more pain than I could have imagined then, it has also enriched and enlarged my life. It has led me through bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments to a better understanding of what it means to be human and even, sometimes, to triumph.”
Our judges always enjoy reading poetry entries but don’t often get as excited as they did about this year’s winner, Rhythms: Poetry and Muse (Tugson Press), by Leo Shelton: “This is an enormously talented man, a complete artist. His work is all-encompassing – you can imagine it as a stage play or as the lyrics to a song. I would love to see the poems performed as part of a dance piece.” Another applauded Shelton’s “honesty, intimacy and ability to communicate at gut level.” Finally, a quote any author would love to hear: “I’ll remember this for the rest of my life. I hope this is a voice that will continue to be heard.”
- Jim Barnes, Awards Director
Click here for a complete list of winners.
