Blooker Prizes: Best Books o' the Blogs and Web Sites

The Lulu Blooker Prizes, the first literary prize devoted to "blooks"--books based on blogs or Web sites--have been awarded in three categories, fiction, nonfiction and comics. There is also an overall winner. The awards are sponsored by Lulu, which makes POD books and an increasing number of blooks.

The overall winner and nonfiction winner is:

Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julia Powell (Little, Brown, $23.95, 031610969X), who spent a year cooking all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Cory Doctorow, one of the judges, commented: "Julia & Julia does that amazing nonfiction trick of making you care about a subject through great storytelling, even if you don't care about the subject itself. Powell's heartfelt, funny, and occasionally obscene tell-all about her journey of self-discovery and cholesterol is by turns funny, shocking and delicious. Those who dismiss blogging as 'mere' confessional writing and complaining about one's day job fail to appreciate just how engrossing those genres can be when handled by a talented writer like Julie Powell. The story of how blogging--writing in public--changed Powell's life is inspirational and memorable."

Fiction winner:

Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest (Tor, $13.95, 0765313081). Judge Paul Jones said, "This blook captivated me with its gusto, its invocation of a dark South both in mountains and in swamp. Priest can tell a tale and she can write a sentence that competes with the best out there. Stephen King should be very afraid."

The comics winner:

Totally Boned: A Joe and Monkey Collection by Zach Miller (Lulu Press, $14.95, 1411671902). Doctorow observed: "Laugh-milk-through-your-nose funny comics aimed at an audience that could only be commercially viable through the Internet. Geeks are distributed in a thin Gaussian layer across the world, and while it might not make sense to put one copy of this in every bookstore in America, putting it online where all geeks can find it makes it into a smash success."