Most Realistic Portrayal of Sex
‘The Position,’ by Meg Wolitzer. In following siblings deeply embarrassed by their sex-guide-writing parents, Wolitzer shows us the gloriously awkward humanity of bodily union even among those most intimately, ickily familiar with its intricacies.

Best Graphic Novel
‘Epileptic,’ by David B. Translated in full for the first time, the French artist’s story of his brother’s lifelong illness fulfills the enormous aesthetic potential of black-and-white comics.

Best Memoir
‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ by Joan Didion, is brilliant and heartbreaking—and, for such a media magnet, deservedly backlash-proof. One detractor did write a letter to the Times Book Review to complain that “this obsession with Didion’s obsession with her loss on the part of the Times and other publications has become morbid and tiring.” But the truth is that in a book where “the question of self-pity” recurs regularly, Didion doesn’t wallow at all. She takes apart her own grief so we can better think about—and prepare for—ours.

Best Memoir Other Than Joan Didion’s
‘The Tender Bar,’ by J. R. Moehringer. Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All was a close contender for nonfictional bildungsroman. But this journalist’s wistful study of the character—and characters—of a Long Island bar called Dickens, where he visited his bartender uncle from the age of 9, won it by carrying on in the local tradition of Joseph Mitchell and Damon Runyon.

Best New York Book
‘New York Night: The Mystique and Its History,’ by Mark Caldwell. Other books gave us incisive looks at New York this year, like Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City, a wonk’s ultimate reference guide to our municipal infrastructure. But Caldwell’s study of New York after dark—from New Amsterdam pub brawls to Studio 54—taps directly into the city’s collective unconscious. Nighttime, after all, is when the Stonewall was raided, when a 1776 fire engulfed the city, and when Hannah “Man-o’-War Nance” Bradshaw suffered a famous case of spontaneous human combustion. It takes a deft storyteller to pull together such disparate fragments in a grand historical context, and Caldwell manages it well.

Best letter to ‘The New York Times Book Review’
(Reedited by us for length; its clarity was never in question.)
To the Editor:
Jeff MacGregor, the reviewer of Character Studies, a collection of [Mark] Singer’s New Yorker profiles (Aug. 21), including the one about me, writes poorly. His painterly turn with nasturtiums sounds like a junior high school yearbook entry. Maybe he and Mark Singer belong together. Some people cast shadows, and other people choose to live in those shadows. . . . The highly respected Joe Queenan mentioned . . . that I had produced “a steady stream of classics” with “stylistic seamlessness” and that the “voice” of my books remained noticeably constant to the point of being an “astonishing achievement.” This was high praise coming from an accomplished writer. . . . I’ll gladly take Joe Queenan over Singer and MacGregor any day of the week—it’s a simple thing called talent!
Donald Trump
New York

Best Feud
Ben Marcus versus Jonathan Franzen
Like all classic literary beefs, this was a tempest in a teapot, in a year with no shortage of them. (See also n+1’s dismissal of McSweeney’s.) But Marcus’s attack in Harper’s on Franzen’s critique of obscure novelists at least brings us back to a central literary question: What should writers and readers expect from each other?

(Photo: Courtesy of Marvel Comics)

Best Book Jacket
‘Maximum Fantastic Four’
This reprint of Jack Kirby’s classic comic illustrations (with an afterword by Walter Mosley) has a foldout jacket-cum-poster featuring the series’ first cover, designed by Paul Sahre. It does what all good covers must: It compels you to open the book.

Best Blurb
Jonathan Ames, for Periel Aschenbrand’s The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own. “Ribald, outrageous, gutter-mouthed, hilarious—a startling new voice in American letters. Watch out Portnoy, watch out Caulfield, watch out Bukowski, watch out Candace Bushnell. Hell, everybody, real or imagined, just watch out! Because here comes Periel Aschenbrand!”

Best Character
‘Willful Creatures,’ by Aimee Bender. A category with multiple winners: Most of the characters in Bender’s story collection—a tiny technology consultant trapped in a birdcage, a marauding gang of teenage girls that speaks in a collective “we”—don’t have names. Some of the most compelling aren’t even human, like a child with an iron for a head, or a brood of potato babies. But in Bender’s surrealistic yet highly accessible fables, their emblematic struggles for freedom, self-knowledge, or just plain existence somehow become more real the more outlandish their circumstances.
—Boris Kachka