Chandra’s first non-fiction work.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: ‘Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty’ (Graywolf Press) by Vikram Chandra has been nominated as a finalist in the Criticism category of The National Book Critics Circle Awards.
The other four finalists in the category are: Eula Biss – On Immunity: An Innoculation (Graywolf Press); Claudia Rankine – Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press); Lynne Tillman – What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (Red Lemonade); and Ellen Willis – The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University of Minnesota Press).
In all, 30 finalists in six categories––autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, general nonfiction, and poetry– were announced, for the best books of 2014.
The National Book Critics Circle Awards (NBCC), founded in 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel here and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book-review editors.
Chandra was born in New Delhi, in 1961, but emigrated to the US when he was in college, and went on to graduate from Pomona College in Claremont, California. He now teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
‘Geek Sublime’ is Chandra’s first work of non-fiction. He has written three works of critically acclaimed fiction prior to that: ‘Red Earth and Pouring Rain’; ‘Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories’; and ‘Sacred Games’.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. The collection of short stories won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region).
Chandra has also co-written with Suketu Mehta ‘Mission Kashmir’, a Bollywood film, starring Hrithik Roshan, and directed by Chandra’s brother-in-law, Vidhu Vinod Chopra.
‘Geek Sublime’ deals with Chandra’s obsession with computer coding, and being a writer at the same time. In the book he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?
Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of Abhinavagupta, the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker, ‘Geek Sublime’ is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer’s art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas, said Graywolf in introducing the book.
The New York Times Book Review wrote of Geek sublime: “An unexpected tour de force. . . . Its ambition: to look deeply, and with great subtlety, into the connections and tensions between the worlds—the cultures—of technology and art. The book becomes an exquisite meditation on aesthetics, and meanwhile it is also part memoir, the story of a young man finding his way from India to the West and back, and from literature to programming and back. . . . Programmers feel an exhilarating creative mastery, and Chandra captures it.”
This year’s awards has something unprecedented: for the first time in NBCC history a single book has been nominated in two categories: Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen: An American Lyric’ published by Graywolf Press is a nominee in both Poetry and Criticism.
The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.
Phil Klay’s short story collection ‘Redeployment’ (Penguin Press) is the recipient of the John Leonard Prize, established in 2014 to recognize outstanding first books in any genre. Named to honor the memory of founding NBCC member John Leonard, the prize is uniquely decided by a direct vote of the organization’s 700 members nationwide, whereas the traditional awards are nominated and chosen by the elected 24-member board of directors.
The recipient of the 2014 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing is Alexandra Schwartz, who is an assistant editor at the New Yorker.
Here is a complete list of the finalists:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
- Blake Bailey, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (W.W. Norton & Co.)
- Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury)
- Lacy M. Johnson, The Other Side (Tin House)
- Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure (Random House)
- Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not (Metropolitan Books)
BIOGRAPHY:
- Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (W.W. Norton & Co.)
- S.C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (Scribner)
- John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Co.)
- Ian S. MacNiven, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (Bloomsbury)
CRITICISM:
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Innoculation (Graywolf Press)
- Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press)
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
- Lynne Tillman, What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (Red Lemonade)
- Ellen Willis, The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University of Minnesota Press)
FICTION:
- Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press)
- Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books)
- Lily King, Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press)
- Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead Books)
- Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
GENERAL NONFICTION:
- David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (Pantheon)
- Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt & Co.)
- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press)
- Hector Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
POETRY:
- Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press)
- Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Books)
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
- Christian Wiman, Once in the West (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Jake Adam York, Abide (Southern Illinois University Press)
The awards will be presented on March 12th at the New School, in Manhattan.