The 19th Annual Minnesota Book Awards nominees have been announced. This year, the somewhat-beleaguered awards are sponsored by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library; from 1999 to 2006, it was sponsored by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. This has been an era of funding cuts across the arts world, and I’m very grateful to the St. Paul Friends for picking up the unsexy book awards.On the list of nominees this year are a couple of writers with whom I’m familiar: Eleanor Arnason, a writer of speculative fiction in the tradition of James Tiptree and Ursula K. LeGuin, for a story printed in a fine press edition by Minnesota Book Arts; and Alicia Conroy, for her collection, Lives of Mapmakers, a story from which I read in Ploughshares a couple years ago. The other fiction titles nominated look intriguing, and I find it interesting that the MBA breaks out a “genre” category (the genre this year being, apparently, crime/mystery). I plan to put these titles on my reading list, and to comment on them here before the May 5 awards ceremony. I already have some thoughts forming about Ms. Arnason’s haunting story, The Grammarian’s Five Daughters, that I hope to whip into shape for tomorrow.

Another nice feature of the MBA is a “readers’ choice” award: “[b]etween March 1 and April 15, readers will be able to visit twincities.com to vote for one of the Minnesota Book Award finalists in 7 categories (excepting Fine Press).” Maybe not quite so democratic as the Million Writers Award, but it’s nice to see the reader acknowledged as the other half of the conversation.

My great disappointment right now isn’t with the MBA at all, but rather with the horribly wan shelving at the chain bookstores. By day I’m out in the suburban boonies, so my choices for book shopping boil down to two spots: Barnes & Noble or Border’s. Since the temperature the last couple days has hovered around 0 degrees Farenheit, I decided to give up my walk around the pond and instead went to the bookstores–B&N yesterday, Border’s today–to track down the nominees. And what did I find? Well, none of the above.

When I worked at B&N a decade ago, we had a halfway decent “local writers” shelf–it was too bad that books from Graywolf or Coffee House or Milkweed, by writers with a good local following and a distinctive local flavor, were put into the ghetto, but at least they were there. No more; the local shelf at B&N was made up of coffee-table picture books of the North Shore, and I couldn’t even find a local shelf at Border’s. And none of the books could be found shelved with the rest of the fiction–I even checked the genre shelves. Unless there’s been a sudden run on them–which, in Eden Prairie and Bloomington, I find somewhat unlikely–I’m suspicious that the Minnesota Book Awards nominees have never graced the shelves of the big chain stores in Minnesota. And that’s really a shame.

There’s been a run of high-end restaurant closings in Minneapolis lately. In her article on the situation, Dara Moskowitz of the City Pages muses that these restaurants “have been engaging in an experiment to pay the full, real, unsubsidized costs for food, and it killed them”–by buying local produce and paying a living wage, these restaurants couldn’t compete on price with the “Quick Cafe” national chains, even if they could compete (and win handily) on quality. And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that something of the same thing has happened with the loss of independent booksellers, at least in this metropolis: Bound to Be Read and Odegard’s devoted a good amount of space to high-quality, locally-grown literature, but they couldn’t compete with the economy of scale the megastores could do on the bland fare everyone else is eating from sea to shining sea. The MBA is a way to, just maybe, make good local authors a little better known, but if a bookseller can’t place their books in the hands of someone ready to read them, the opportunity is lost.

But I won’t despair, nor be deterred. There are still some great little independent shops (emphasis on little–that may be what keeps them alive): Common Good Books, Micawber’s, and BirchBark Books are all likely to carry a couple of these titles. And I’m hopeful that the library will have a couple on the shelf (what with the Friends supporting the awards and all). Books this good are worth the extra effort needed to find them.