Predicting (or speculating on) who will win tonight’s National Book Awards is harder than usual, as the awards themselves are headed towards a process that will have broader resonance with readers. In past years, particularly for fiction, commercial success was often a deficit more than an advantage, but that may no longer apply. Among the fiction nominees, Nielsen Bookscan print sales data confirms Junot Diaz’s book as the most successful title in the marketplace, though a win for Diaz would make him the first person to win for a book of stories since Andrea Barrett’s 1996 award for Ship Fever and […]
