New York, NY – February 3, 2009 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced the finalists for its prestigious 2008 Discover Great New Writers Awards.  The winners in each category, fiction and nonfiction, receive a $10,000 prize and a full year of additional promotion from Barnes & Noble.  Second-place finalists receive $5,000, and third-place finalists, $2,500.  The finalists are:

Fiction:

• Zachary Lazar, Sway (Little, Brown)
• Gin Phillips, The Well and the Mine (Hawthorne Books)
• Benjamin Taylor, The Book of Getting Even (Steerforth Press)

Nonfiction:

• David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey through His Son’s Addiction (Houghton Mifflin)
• Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World (Twelve)
• Nia Wyn, Blue Sky July: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Healing (Dutton)

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, March 4, at a private awards ceremony.  At 7:00 p.m. that evening, all six finalists are invited to read from their work at Barnes & Noble’s Tribeca store in New York City, located at 97 Warren Street (at Greenwich Street).  The Discover Awards honor the best works featured the previous calendar year in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program.

The Finalists
Zachary Lazar’s second novel, Sway, weaves together three storylines to form a dark, harrowing and kaleidoscopic portrait of the late Sixties.  Fictionalizing the narrative voices of Brian Jones (of the Rolling Stones), avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and Charles Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil, Lazar probes the dark heart of a decade that began with peace-professing promise only to end in violence.  The Well and the Mine, Gin Phillips’ debut novel set in 1930s Alabama, gracefully employs a chorus of narratives to reveal the racial and class divides that arise in the wake of a young girl’s testimony.  The coming of age of a college student is the theme of Benjamin Taylor’s second novel, The Book of Getting Even, which follows – with pathos and humor – an aspiring astronomer as he learns the limits of both mathematics and relationships.

Beautiful Boy is David Sheff’s devastating and personal account of his efforts to save his teenage son Nick from an addiction to methamphetamine.   Having spent a fair amount of time in war torn regions, Eric Weiner’s quest to discover better environs led him to ferret out the undiscovered “happiest” places on earth.  The result of his efforts is his hilarious and intelligent debut, The Geography of Bliss.  Written as haiku-like journal entries, Nia Wyn’s personal memoir Blue Sky July is a haunting yet uplifting diary of her experience as the mother of a special needs child.

The Jurists
Two panels of distinguished literary jurists selected the finalists and will select the winners.  Serving as this year’s fiction jurists are Kate Christensen, the author of the novels In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure’s Lament and The Great Man; Suzanne Finnamore, the author of Otherwise Engaged, The Zygote Chronicles, and most recently, Split: A Memoir of Divorce; and Mark Jude Poirier, the author of the novels Modern Ranch Living and Goats, two short-story collections, and the screenplay for the film Smart People. 

This year’s nonfiction judges include Edward Dolnick, author of The Forger’s Spell, Down the Great Unknown, The Rescue Artist, and Madness on the Couch; travel writer J. Maarten Troost, who penned The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Getting Stoned with Savages, and most recently, Lost on Planet China; and NPR correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, who won the Discover Award in 2002 for A Death in Texas. 

The Discover Awards
The Discover Great New Writers program was established in 1990 to highlight works of exceptional literary quality that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book marketplace.  This year’s selections featured the work of 58 new and previously underappreciated writers.  Submissions to the program are read and discussed by a group of Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection for the program’s seasonal promotions.  Recent winners of the annual Discover Great New Writers Award include Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (2007), Kate Braestrup for Here If You Need Me (2007), Ben Fountain for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006), Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts of No Nation (2005), Nathaniel Fick for One Bullet Away (2005), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals (2004), Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003), Manil Suri for The Death of Vishnu (2001), and Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000).