In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, Flannery O'Connor's collection of short stories, “The Complete Stories” was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest’s sixty-year-old history. You can find the complete story here and here.

Other winners: Dave Eggers won the 2009 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

Phillip Hoose took the Young People’s Literature Award for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” a book about an African American teenagers in Montgomery, Alabama, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman,

Keith Waldrop won the National Book Award for Poetry for “Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy,”

T.J. Stiles took the prize for non-fiction with “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” a biography of the man who rose from being a boatman to running a vast steamship and railroad empire.

Colum McCann’s novel “Let the Great World Spin” took the fiction prize.