National Magazine Awards Finalists Announced

Wow! Everyone in our office has been trying not to hyperventilate. The finalists for the 2006 National Magazine Awards (the magazine world’s equivalent to the Pulitzers or the National Book Awards) were announced today and VQR garnered six nominations! Pretty unheard of for a magazine our size. The Atlantic Monthly led all magazines with eight nominations, then came us, followed by GQ, Harper’s, National Geographic, New York, and The New Yorker with five nominations each. Pretty heady company. We received a nomination in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations under 100,000 (which we fit well under). Also nominated in this category were Aperture, The Believer, Legal Affairs, and ReadyMade.

And congrats go out to our writers whose work was chosen as finalists:

• Sven Birkerts, for Reviews & Criticism, for his essays “Humboldt’s Gift” (Summer issue) and “A Weekend at Montauk” (Winter 2005 issue),
• Pauline W. Chen in the Essay category for “Dead Enough?: The Paradox of Brain Death” (Fall 2005 issue),
• Martin Preib in the Essay category for “The Wagon” (Summer 2005 issue),
• Isabel Allende in Fiction for “The Guggenheim Lovers” (Summer 2005 issue; sorry, not available online),
• Brock Clarke in Fiction for “The Ghosts We Love” (Summer 2005 issue),
• Alan Heathcock in Fiction for “Peacekeeper” (Fall 2005 issue),
• R.T. Smith in Fiction for “Ina Grove” (Fall 2005 issue),
• And Joyce Carol Oates in Fiction for two stories, “So Help Me God” (Winter 2005 issue) and “Smother” (Fall 2005 issue). (Incredibly, Oates had another story nominated, “High Lonesome” published in Zoetrope: All Story.)

Winners will be announced on May 9 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.