Why and how
When Marjorie Garber chaired the National Book Award committee for nonfiction in 2010, she had 500 books to read and a myriad of questions. Garber, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies, immediately got on the horn with her committee members and asked: “What are the criteria? How are we going to come to an agreement?” “We set down two criteria, which sound very vague, but which were absolutely central for us,” recalled Garber. “The book had to be well-written. It could not merely be well-researched, but it had to be pleasurable, moving, engrossing to read. And, secondly, we wanted it to be something that would last. We wanted it to be a book that we thought people would read again.” Thinking critically about literature is nothing new for Garber. She knew even as a teenager traveling to see T.S. Eliot speak at the 92nd Street...