It wasn’t hometown bias that had me thinking Aleksandar Hemon would pull down the 2008 National Book Award for his novel, The Lazarus Project. Aside from all of its literary worthiness, it just seemed to have the right amount of heft, and heft is the sort of thing NBA judges tend to go for. But last week when I read the story in the New York Times on the weak-sauce tempest brewing over whether Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country—a novel that’s really a revised combination of three previous novels—should actually count as a new novel, I thought "That’s the kind of story that wins awards!" Or, at least, if one nominee garners that much more attention than the others, there seems to be a good chance he’s going to nab the award. And he did, so a hearty congrats to Matthiessen (pictured).

Hometown bard Reginald Gibbons lost out to Mark Doty, which just perpetuates that chip on my shoulder that Gibbons deserves more credit than he gets. Annette Gordon-Reed won for The Hemingses of Monticello, trumping my pick, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, and Judy Blundell won the prize for young-adult fiction for her book, What I Saw and How I Lied.

Not that I have any interest in flopping more predictions, but I do think there’s a good chance Hemon could pull a Junot Díaz. Díaz’s virtuosic The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao wasn’t even nominated for a National Book Award, but it won the Pulitzer in the same year. So we’ll have to wait until April to see if Pulitzer picks up the slack.