Salvage the bones: a novel by Jesmyn Ward was announced on Wednesday as the winner of the National Book Award for fiction. The novel — about a poor, rural African American family living in Mississippi and facing obstacles no less then Hurricane Katrina — was considered "a long shot, at best" to win the prestigious award according to a CNN article. Ward, herself a Katrina survivior, was surprised and delighted. Now on the radar, critics are quickly praising it as a "classical tragedy."