Start the new year off right with great books for adults, selected and judged by a committee of library professionals—members of the American Booksellers Association, Booklist magazine editors and contributors, and Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) members—who work closely with adult readers.
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction was established in 2012 and annually recognizes the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year. The authors of the fiction and non-fiction books selected as winners receive a $5,000 cash award. This year, the winners will be announced on January 26 during an event at LibLearnX.
Fiction
Winner
To be announced on January 26
- Finalists
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A staggering, tender epic about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them.
For over thirty years, Old Second and his wife, Bao Mei, have cobbled together a meager existence in New York City’s Chinatown. But unlike other couples, these two aren’t in love. In rural China, before they emigrated, they frequented the Workers’ Cinema: a rundown theater where gay men cruised without fear for intimacy and conversation.
While classic war films played, Old Second and his countrymen found privacy—and love—in the screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold tickets to closeted men; guarding their secrets, guiding them in their relationships, and even finding her own happiness with the theater’s projectionist. But when Old Second’s passion for his lover is discovered, a series of haunting events unfold, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.
As we follow these characters from China to New York, from first love to old age, we bear witness to the tensions of immigration—and how memory forever weighs down the present. Cinema Love is a big-hearted and heart-shattering novel about desire, secrets, grief, how we care for one another, and how we survive.
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A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view.
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
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Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
- Longlist
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Swift River by Essie J. Chambers
It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: She’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and the fact that since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on.
But when Diamond receives a letter from a relative she’s never met, key elements of Pop’s life are uncovered. She is introduced to two generations of African American Newberry women, spanning the 20th century and revealing a much larger picture of prejudice and abandonment, of love and devotion. As pieces of their shared past become clearer, Diamond gains a sense of her place in the world and in her family. But how will what she’s learned of the past change her future?
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Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler
Don’t worry about what Dennis Monk did when he was drinking. He’s sober now, ready to rejoin the world of leases and paychecks, reciprocal friendships and healthy romances—if only the world would agree to take him back. When his working-stiff parents kick him out of their suburban home, mere months into his frangible sobriety, the 26-year-old spends his first dry summer couch surfing through South Philadelphia, struggling to find a place for himself in the throng of adulthood.
Monk’s haphazard pilgrimage leads him through a city in flux: growing, gentrifying, haunted by its history and its unrealized potential. Everyone he knew from college seems to be doing better than him—and most of them aren’t even doing that well. His run-ins with former classmates, estranged drinking buddies, and prospective lovers challenge his version of events past and present, revealing that recovery is not the happy ending he’d expected, only a fraught next chapter.
Like a sober, millennial Jesus’ Son, Michael Deagler’s debut novel is the poignant confession of a recovering addict adrift in the fragmenting landscape of America’s middle class. Shot through with humor, hubris, and hard-earned insight, Early Sobrieties charts the limbos that exist between our better and worst selves, offering a portrait of a stifled generation collectively slouching towards grace.
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You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer
From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.
One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.
Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma – who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods – the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.
You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.
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A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell
On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.
Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.
Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”
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The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza
Ernesto and Elena Vega arrive in Mexico City where Ernesto works on a construction site until he is discovered by a local lucha libre trainer. At a time when luchadores—Mexican wrestlers donning flamboyant masks and capes—were treated as daredevils or rockstars, Ernesto finds fame as El Rey Coyote, rapidly gaining name recognition across Mexico.
Years later, in East Los Angeles Freddy Vega is struggling to save his father’s gym while Freddy’s own son Julian is searching for professional and romantic fulfillment as a Mexican American gay man refusing to be defined by stereotypes. The once larger-than-life Ernesto Vega is now dying, leading Freddy and Julian to find their own passions and discover what really happened back in Mexico.
Told from alternating perspectives, Ernesto takes you from the ranches of Michoacán to the makeshift colonias and crowded sports arenas of Mexico City. Freddy describes life in the suburban streets of 1980s Los Angeles and the community their family built as Julian descends deep into the culture of hook-up apps, lucha burlesque shows, and the dark underbelly of West Hollywood, The Sons of El Rey is an intimate portrait of a family wading against time and legacy, yet always choosing the fight.
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Float Up, Sing Down by Laird Hunt
Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to the Galaxy Swirl, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed.
Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.
Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character's 'day-in-the-life' in one of Hunt's most beloved and enduring landscapes. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience.
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Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.
On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.
Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.
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Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and writes stories for him about things both impossible and true. Stories I Wrote for the Devil lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil, where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of living people. Ananda Lima speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences―of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging―and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.
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The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.
There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.
When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author at the peak of his powers.
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A dazzling and ambitious debut novel that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.
2040: Wealthy real estate investor Leo Yang—handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man—is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His sophisticated Japanese-French wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter’s revelation will soon reroute them to Paris. 2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe. 2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.
As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit—a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. We glimpse a future where the city’s waters rise and the specter of apocalypse is never far off. But in Juli Min’s hands, we also see that whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing.
Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is an unforgettable exploration of marriage, relationships, and the layered experience of time.
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Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the diverse city into ethnic enclaves; each morning, the residents – whether Muslim, Croat or Serb – push the makeshift barriers aside.
When violence finally spills over, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety with her daughter in England. Reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a handful of weeks, she stays behind while the city falls under siege. As the assault deepens and everything they love is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops, Zora and her friends are forced to rebuild themselves, over and over. Theirs is a breathtaking story of disintegration, resilience and hope.
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Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver
A bold and haunting debut story collection that follows various characters as they navigate the day-to-day perils of Jim Crow racism from Diane Oliver, a missing figure in the canon of twentieth-century African American literature, with an introduction by Tayari Jones
A remarkable talent far ahead of her time, Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22, leaving behind these crisply told and often chilling tales that explore race and racism in 1950s and 60s America. In this first and only collection by a masterful storyteller finally taking her rightful place in the canon, Oliver’s insightful stories reverberate into the present day.
There’s the nightmarish “The Closet on the Top Floor” in which Winifred, the first Black student at her newly integrated college, starts to physically disappear; “Mint Juleps not Served Here” where a couple living deep in a forest with their son go to bloody lengths to protect him; “Spiders Cry without Tears,” in which a couple, Meg and Walt, are confronted by prejudices and strains of interracial and extramarital love; and the high tension titular story that follows a nervous older sister the night before her little brother is set to desegregate his school.
These are incisive and intimate portraits of African American families in everyday moments of anxiety and crisis that look at how they use agency to navigate their predicaments. As much a social and historical document as it is a taut, engrossing collection, Neighbors is an exceptional literary feat from a crucial once-lost figure of letters.
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Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There There —winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the John Leonard Prize, the American Book Award, and one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2018— Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather’s shooting in There There.
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.
Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.
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A dazzling new work of literary fiction from the author of The Essex Serpent, a story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.
Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.
Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.
A thrillingly ambitious novel of friendship, faith, and unrequited love, rich in symmetry and symbolism, Enlightenment is a shimmering wonder of a book and Sarah Perry’s finest work to date.
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There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes, Jr.
An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own. An ordinary man wakes one morning to discover he’s a famous reggaetón star. An aging abuela slowly morphs into a marionette puppet. A struggling academic discovers the horrifying cost of becoming a Self-Made Man. In There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven , Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. Boundaries between the past, present, and future are blurred. Menacing technology and unchecked bureaucracy cut through everyday life with uncanny dread. The characters, from mango farmers to popstars to ex-guerilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices—choices that not only mean life or death, but might also allow them to be heard in a world set on silencing the voices of Central Americans. Blazing with heart, humor, and inimitable style, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven subverts everything we think we know about migration and its consequences, capturing what it means to take up a new life—whether willfully or forced—with piercing and brilliant clarity. A gifted new storyteller and trailblazing stylist, Reyes not only transports to other worlds but alerts us to the heartache and injustice of our own.
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Colored Television by Danzy Senna
A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex
Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,” she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.
But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content” for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.” She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
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The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck
A stunning collection of interconnected stories set in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.
The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.
Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.
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Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.
It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on—a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city's secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.
The multiple-award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly created, richly pleasure-giving, epically scaled tale set in the golden age of wicked entertainments.
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The blood that came out of me was blood that ran through her veins. It’s strange: all blood looks the same, yet it’s different, we’re told, in so many various ways and for so many various reasons. But one thing is for certain, I thought: you are who you are, even if you don’t know it.
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life—from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can—his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia—he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident—a death he and Louise are at odds over as to where to lay blame—Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known?
From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another
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God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas
After a deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a MD/PhD student at The University of Pennsylvania, and an emergency department tech at a hospital in North Philly, he becomes interested in the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, in which the prison conducted scientific trials on their inmates. Through this curiosity he comes to know his estranged father, who is serving time for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, his best friend Murray, a fellow vet, judges the journey he sets out upon, while simultaneously pushing him towards a ruinous self-discovery. Balancing single fatherhood, his studies, and long shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his more storied friends and colleagues.
GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
Non-Fiction
Winner
To be announced on January 26
- Finalists
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Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
The definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster based on new archival research and in-depth reporting.
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.
Based on extensive archival records and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and ultimately kept from the public.
Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.
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Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum
Who invented reality TV, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre, and why can’t we look away from it? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary,” Emily Nussbaum unearths the surprising origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who created it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue The Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.
Nussbaum traces four paths of reality innovation—game shows, prank shows, soap operas, and clip shows—that united in the Survivor format, sparking a tumultuous Hollywood gold-rush. Along the way, we meet tricksters and innovators—from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; Bachelor mastermind Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray, the visionary behind The Real World—along with dozens of crew members and ordinary people whose lives became fodder for the reality revolution. We learn about the tools of the trade—like Candid Camera’s brilliant “reveal” and the notorious Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and the moral outrage that reality shows provoked. But Cue The Sun! also celebrates what made the genre so powerful: a jolt of authentic emotion.
Through broad-ranging reporting, Nussbaum examines seven tumultuous decades, exploring the celebreality boom, reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, and the dark truth behind The Apprentice. A shrewd observer who cares about television, she is the ideal voice for the first substantive cultural history of the genre that has, for better or worse, made America what it is today.
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A deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek.
The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.
Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.
Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors’ camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.
An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.
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There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture’s most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jumpshot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”
There’s Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It’s about basketball in the way They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.Image
Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance by Victoria Blanco
One displaced Rarámuri family charts a path forward for themselves and their community in this testament to the power of perseverance and the many forms resistance can take.
The effects of climate catastrophe and Indigenous erasure are specific and unforgettable in Out of the Sierra ’s vivid portrait of one Rarámuri family forced to leave their home in the Sierra Madre mountains. Displaced by drought and food shortages, Martina, Luis, and their children journey to Chihuahua City, toward a new and uncertain future in a government-funded Indigenous settlement.
With tenderness, intelligence, and deep insight into the many shapes resistance can take, Out of the Sierra offers a testimony to human resilience and the power of community in the face of broken systems. Blanco considers Indigenous resistance and identity, race, and climate change with compassion and care, What can we learn from the Rarámuri people, who are resisting assimilation and upholding traditional knowledge in our era of climate catastrophe?
Based on two years of oral history collection and participatory field work, Out of the Sierra elevates the stories of the Gutiérrez family and interrogates the systems and history that caused their displacement and poverty.
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An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer
Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.
This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.
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The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets by Thomas R. Cech
Exploring the most transformative breakthroughs in biology since the discovery of the double helix, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist unveils the RNA age.
For over half a century, DNA has dominated science and the popular imagination as the “secret of life.” But over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place. In a series of breathtaking discoveries, the biochemist Thomas R. Cech and a diverse cast of brilliant scientists have revealed that RNA―long overlooked as the passive servant of DNA―sits at the center of biology’s greatest mysteries: How did life begin? What makes us human? Why do we get sick and grow old? In The Catalyst, Cech finally brings together years of research to demonstrate that RNA is the true key to understanding life on Earth, from its very origins to our future in the twenty-first century.
A gripping journey of discovery, The Catalyst moves from the early experiments that first hinted at RNA’s spectacular powers, to Cech’s own paradigm-shifting finding that it can catalyze cellular reactions, to the cutting-edge biotechnologies poised to reshape our health. We learn how RNA―once thought merely to transmit DNA’s genetic instructions to the cell’s protein-making machinery―may have jump-started life itself, and how, at the same time, it can cut our individual lives short through viral diseases and cancer. We see how RNA is implicated in the aging process and explore the darker depths of the supposed fountain of youth, telomerase. And we catch a thrilling glimpse into how RNA-powered therapies―from CRISPR, the revolutionary tool that uses RNA to rewrite the code of life, to the groundbreaking mRNA vaccines that have saved millions during the pandemic, and more―may enable us to improve and even extend life beyond nature’s current limits.
Written by one of our foremost scientists, The Catalyst is a must-read guide to the present and future of biology and medicine.
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The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps.
When József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived the “selection,” which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders—anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder—decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die.
Debreczeni survived the liberation of Auschwitz and immediately recorded his experiences in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest, most merciless indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, is an eyewitness account of incomparable literary quality. It was published in the Hungarian language in 1950, but it was never translated, due to Cold War hostilities and rising antisemitism. More than 70 years later, this masterpiece that was nearly lost to time is now being published in more than 15 different languages for the first time, and will finally take its rightful place among the greatest works of Holocaust literature.
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Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.
We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.
Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.
In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.
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Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls, illustrated by the author
An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.
In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the stories of her grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.
Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school―and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.
Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns to face the history that shaped her.
Gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls' homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, it exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
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A riveting account of the anarchists who terrorized the streets of New York—and the detective duo who transformed policing to meet the threat—from the bestselling author of The Ghost Map
When Arthur Woods took command of the NYPD in April of 1914, the institution was still largely the corrupt, low-tech organization of the Tammany Hall era. To the extent the police were stopping crime—as opposed to committing it—their role had been almost entirely defined by physical the brawn of the cop on the beat keeping criminals at bay with nightsticks and fists. The solving of crimes was largely outside their purview.
Woods was determined to change that, but he couldn’t have anticipated the maelstrom of violence that would test his science-based approach to policing. Within weeks of his tenure, New York City was engulfed in the most concentrated terrorism campaign in the nation’s history, a five-year period of relentless bombings, many of them perpetrated by the anarchist movement led by the legendary radicals Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.
Steven Johnson’s engrossing account of the struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state stretches around the world and back to the nineteenth century—to Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, to the development of forensic science in France, and to the assassination of Czar Alexander II, an event that propelled Berkman and Goldman’s emigration from Russia to America and inspired their conviction that the nation state must be destroyed. As the forces of anarchy and policing clash in New York City, we meet Inspector Joseph Faurot, a science-first detective who works closely with Woods in reforming the police force; Hans Schmidt, the psychotic killer priest whose capture turns Faurot into a household name; and Amadeo Polignani, the young Italian undercover detective who infiltrates the notorious Bresci Circle.
Johnson reveals a mostly forgotten period of political conviction, scientific discovery, assassination plots, bombings, undercover operations, and innovative sleuthing. The Infernal Machine is the complex pre-history of our current moment, when decentralized anarchist networks have once again taken to the streets to protest law enforcement abuses, right-wing militia groups have attacked government buildings, and surveillance is almost ubiquitous.
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This Part Is Silent: A Life between Cultures by SJ Kim
A searing essay collection that explores displacement and loss, creativity and change, institutional power and progress
Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
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Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon
A captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes—from an award-winning science writer
For centuries humans ignored sound in the “silent world” of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn’t perceive, didn’t exist. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with temperature, and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems.
In Sing Like Fish , award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon synthesizes historical discoveries with the latest research in a clear and compelling portrait of this sonic undersea world. From plainfin midshipman fish, whose swim-bladder drumming is loud enough to keep houseboat-dwellers awake, to the syntax of whalesong, from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp, to underwater earthquakes and volcanoes, sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning - even in animals that we never suspected of acoustic ability.
Meanwhile, we jump in our motorboats and cruise ships, oblivious to the impact below us. Our lifestyle is fuelled by oil in growling tankers and furnished by goods that travel in massive container ships. Navies deploy underwater sonar, and prospectors use seismic imaging to seek oil and gas under ocean floors. Our seas echo with human-made sound, but we are just learning how these pervasive noises can mask mating calls, chase animals from their food, and even wound creatures as from plankton to lobsters.
With intimate and artful prose, Sing Like Fish tells a uniquely complete story of ocean animals’ submerged sounds, envisions a quieter future, and offers a profound new understanding of the world below the surface.
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Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe
The winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for her memoir, Red Paint , Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe returns with a razor-sharp, clear-eyed selection of essays on what it means to be a proudly queer, indigenous woman in America today.
Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.
Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue between the miraculous and the mundane, the spiritual and the physical, as they examine the role of art--in particular music--and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.
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Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles
From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand
Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero—the woman who, despite being barely five feet tall, illiterate, and suffering from a brain injury, managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some 750 people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.
Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes the more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.
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By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle
A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.
Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.
In the 1830s, Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn’t have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling that would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle’s own Cherokee Nation.
Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.
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Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin
From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet.
Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds.
Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish.
A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America’s doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.
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Hip-Hop Is History by Questlove and Ben Greenman
In Hip-Hop is History, Questlove, one of the major and most revolutionary figures of that genre, unpicks one hip-hop song from each of the years since the sound of breakbeat drums first burst out of a house party in the Bronx on 11 August 1973. Clive Campbell, a Jamaican-born teenager threw the party. Questlove wants to talk about the present. In this book he analyses the conditions of each song's creation, its lyrical and musical content, and its role in pushing the genre forward and shining a light on Black American History. Questlove was there at the beginning. He's still creating and influencing in the present. He is the perfect companion on this journey through the music, the context and the lasting impact.
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Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson
For fans of H Is for Hawk and Shop Class as Soulcraft comes a captivating literary memoir, immersing readers in the life of a Scottish carpenter as he perfects his craft, builds a business, and reflects on what inheritance and shared responsibility really mean.
The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing craft lessons in his father’s workshop. In time he became his father’s apprentice, helping to create exquisite bespoke objects. But eventually the need to find his own path led him to establish his own workshop and chase ever bigger and more commercial projects, until the devastating loss of one major job threatened to bring it all crashing down. Faced with the end of his business, his team, and everything he had worked so hard to build, he was forced to question what mattered most.
In beautifully wrought prose, Callum tells the story of returning to the workshop and to the wood, to handcrafting furniture for people who will love it and then pass it on to the next generation—an antidote to a culture where everything seems so easily disposable. As he does so, he brings us closer to nature and the physical act of creation—and we begin to understand how he has been shaped, as both a craftsman and a son.
Blending memoir and nature writing at its finest, Ingrained is an uplifting meditation on the challenges of working with your hands in our modern age, on community, consumerism, and the beauty of the natural world—one that asks us to see our local trees, and our own wooden objects, in a new and revelatory light.
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When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow
A glittering, glamorous portrait of the golden age of American department stores and of three visionary women who led them, from the award-winning author of The Plaza .
The American department a palace of consumption that epitomized modern consumerism. Every wish could be met under one roof – afternoon tea, a stroll through the latest fashions, a wedding (or funeral) planned. It was a place where women, shopper and shopgirl alike, could stake out a newfound independence. Whether in New York or Chicago or on Main Street, USA, men owned the buildings, but inside, women ruled.
In this hothouse atmosphere, three women rose to the top. Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, and Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel's took risks, innovated and competed as very different kinds of career women, forging new paths for the women who followed in their footsteps. In the 1930s, Hortense came to her husband's department store as a housewife tasked with attracting more shoppers like herself, and wound up running the company. Dorothy championed American designers during World War II--before which US fashions were almost exclusively Parisian copies--and beyond, becoming the first businesswoman to earn a salary of more than $1.5 million. And Geraldine re-invented the look of the modern department store in the 1960s, and had a preternatural sense for trends, inspiring a devoted following of ultra-chic shoppers as well as decades of copycats.
In When Women Ran Fifth Avenue, journalist Julie Satow draws back the curtain on three American women who made twentieth-century department stores a mecca for women of every age, social class, and ambition. This stylish account, rich with personal drama and trade secrets, captures the department store in all its glitz, decadence, and fun, and showcases the women who made that beautifully curated world go round.
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Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa
Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.”
Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.
Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.
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Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity by Ellen van Neerven
From an award-winning First Nations author, a ground-breaking examination of sport's troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality. Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays football from a young age, learning early on that sport can be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realise about sport's troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality, questioning what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises. With emotional honesty and searing insight, van Neerven shines a light on sport on this continent from a queer First Nations perspective, revealing how some athletes have long challenged mainstream views and used their roles to effect change not only in their own realm, but in society more broadly. Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that confirms, once again, van Neerven's unrivalled talent, courage and originality.
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Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order by Yuan Yang
A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society
While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times , Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.
The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.
As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children's access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.