You can pick your friends...you can pick your nose...

As if there aren't enough award ceremonies in our culture, along comes the National Book Foundation "you pick the winner" contest. Between now and November 18th you, gentle reader, can select "The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction" from a list of 6 famous works that have won the National Book Award for Fiction in the last 60 years. The nominees are:

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Zzzzz...)
The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (Sorry, Billy this here contest is going to Ralphie.)
The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor (Woot!)
The Stories of John Cheever
Gravity's Rainbow - Tommy Pynchon (A weariness comes across my eyelids.)
Invisible "The best novel written in America since the war hands down" Man - Ralph Ellison

All you have to do is supply an email address to vote and maybe, just maybe, win "two tickets to the 60th National Book Awards on November 18, 2009 and two nights in the Marriott Hotel Downtown, compliments of Marriott! "

You can find the ballot here. The current results (as of 4:21 on 9/21/09) are:



Not voting for Ralph Ellison makes puppies and babies cry, just sayin'.

-Eds.