I’ve just come back from the celebration of the first hundred years of Mondadori, Italy’s largest publisher, with 35% of the market in their country. It was an elegant and exuberant occasion, capped by an extraordinary concert at the world-famous Teatro alla Scala which was attended by authors and publishers from all over the world—a stirring reminder of the central importance of publishing in the life of a culture. I think everyone who was there felt privileged to share in saluting this remarkable milestone.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. we have just had our own literary celebration—the 58th National Book Awards here in New York. The NBAs, too, draw attention to the vital importance of books in our culture. That is why the awards are National: they help us define what our country is really all about.

The books chosen this year vindicate that assertion, I think. The winner in children’s literature, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, is a powerful novel drawn from the author’s own experience that has already won a wide and admiring audience. Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, a devastating history of the CIA, won in non-fiction. Robert Hass, a former US poet laureate whose work has helped define the preoccupations of a generation, received the poetry prize for Time and Materials. And the fiction award went to FSG’s novelist Denis Johnson for Tree of Smoke, a deep and intense novel about Americans in Vietnam which the judges called “a careening journey into our national subconscious.”

I’m particularly proud to add that FSG had three other nominees this year: Mischa Berlinski’s first novel Fieldwork and Lydia Davis’s story collection Varieties of Disturbance, her fifth book with FSG, were also selected in the fiction category, while Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, published by our Hill & Wang imprint, was nominated in non-fiction.

All of us have reservations about awards, and not only when our own favorites don’t win, but in a certain sense it’s not really who the winner is that counts in the end. What matters is that we take time to celebrate the centrality of writers and their work in our national life, calling attention to how books help us to understand and feel more deeply the lives we are living. Publishers need extraordinary interventions today—from other media, from trusted public figures, from new retailing opportunities, and from prize juries, too—to break through the swelling background noise of the ever-increasing claims on our attention. Prizes, if they’re done right, can help get really good books noticed and sold in great quantities today—as we see in Britain with the Mann Booker Prize, the Prix Goncourt in France, and the Premio Strega in Italy.

I think all of us would like the NBAs to gain in prominence so that they have the kind of broader recognition that, say, the Pulitzer Prizes do, and there are ongoing debates about how to achieve this. My own feeling is that the NBAs should not try to become more popular, but to seek to single out the best as it is understood by the writers selected to be judges in a particular year. No decision of any jury is ever going to please everyone, but if the awards are honest and thoughtful, as the NBAs by and large have been, they will continue to gain in authority over time. Harold Augenbraum, who directs the National Book Foundation, deserves recognition and support for his dedicated and imaginative approach to administering these important prizes and for working with publishers to help them achieve the greater public recognition they deserve.

Jonathan Galassi is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux