Staff Picks
2021 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
- Bland L.
- Thursday, February 10, 2022
Collection
The finalists for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards were recently announced. Given annually since 1976, they are the only major book awards selected by critics. The winners will be announced in March. Check out the following finalists from our collection, in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism. (The list also includes the finalists for the NBCC's John Leonard Prize for Best First Book.)
A Little Devil in America
Published in 2021
A stirring meditation on Black performance in America from the? New York Times? bestselling author of ?Go Ahead in the Rain “Whether heralding unsung entertainers or reexamining legends, Hanif Abdurraqib weaves together gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak, and joy within Black performance.?I read this book breathlessly.”?Brit Bennett, author of? The Vanishing Half At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines?whether it?s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt?has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib?s own personal history of love, grief, and performance. Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart,? A Little Devil in America ?exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space?from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.
Until I Am Free
Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
Published in 2021
"Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe. Despite her limited material resources and the myriad challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making a difference in the lives of others. She refused to be sidelined in the movement and refused to be intimidated by those of higher social status and with better jobs and education. In these pages, Hamer's words and ideas take center stage, allowing us all to hear the activist's voice and deeply engage her words, as though we had the privilege to sit right beside her. More than 40 years since Hamer's death in 1977, her words still speak truth to power, laying bare the faults in American society and offering valuable insights on how we might yet continue the fight to help the nation live up to its core ideals of "equality and justice for all."" -- Provided by publisher.
Second Place
Published in 2021
"From the author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships"-- Provided by publisher.
Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?
Essays
Published in 2020
Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own diagnosis with cancer. Her columns in the London Review of Books -- selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, ranged from subjects as various as happiness, social psychology, self-absorption and cats -- have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
Published in 2021
Part biography, part political thriller, part scholarly detective story that draws on letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, and other documents, this true story chronicles the life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany.
Girlhood
Published in 2021
Named a Most Anticipated Book by: The New York Times * Buzzfeed * Time.com * OprahMag.com * The Millions * The Rumpus * LitHub * Paperback Paris * The Lily ( Washington Post ) * Ms . * LAMBDA Literary A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society. In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them. When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she'd been told about herself and the habits and defenses she'd developed over years of trying to meet others' expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs. Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny. Written with Febos' characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.
Somebody's Daughter
A Memoir
Published in 2021
"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who understands her. She thinks she understands him too. He's sensitive like her, an artist, and maybe even just as afraid of the dark. She's certain that one day they'll be reunited again, and she'll finally feel complete. There are just a few problems: he's in prison, and she doesn't know what he did to end up there. Through poverty, puberty, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley returns to her image of her father for hope and encouragement. She doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates; when the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley finally finds out why her father is in prison. And that's where the story really begins. Somebody's Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she provides a poignant coming-of-age recollection that speaks to finding the threads between who you are and what you were born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them. "Ashley Ford's prose is glass-so clear, sharp and smooth that the reader sees, in vivid focus, her complicated childhood, brilliant mind, and golden heart. The gravity and urgency of Somebody's Daughter anchored me to my chair and slowed my heartbeat-like no book has since Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Ashley Ford is a writer for the ages, and Somebody's Daughter will be a book of the year." -- Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed and founder of Together Rising"-- Provided by publisher.
A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes
A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha
Published in 2021
"In March 2014, Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most internationally beloved writers of the 20th century, came down with a cold. He was almost 87 years old, and battling dementia. 'I don't think we'll get out of this one,' Mercedes Barcha, his wife of over fifty years, told Rodrigo, their son. As reality begins to sink in, Rodrigo asks himself, 'Is this how the end begins?' Instead of waiting for an answer, Rodrigo starts to write about the beginning of the end. The resulting pages became A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes -- an intimate and honest account of the last days of a literary genius's life, written by an exceptional witness. Through Rodrigo's measured prose, we are not only reminded of an icon's mortality, but his remarkable humanity. We see the great writer--a master at creating the dramatic arc of an entire life on the page--become a tragic yet charming character of his own right as he and his family come to terms with the end. With A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, Rodrigo has written not a novel, but a stunning work of reportage. The minute and major snapshots captured--Rodrigo and his brother's discomfort around the public interest in their father's state, Mercedes' reluctant deference to Gabriel's knowing aides, and Gabriel's wry humor at a vulnerable time, when his lucidity is waning--form a diary, distilled by distance and time, but invigorated by introspection. Gabriel savors affection and attention from those in his orbit, but wrestles with what he will lose and what is already lost. And almost always by his side is the charismatic Mercedes, his constant companion and creative muse. The book also honors Rodrigo's late mother, introducing readers to one of the foremost influences of his father's life. Bittersweet and insightful, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes celebrates the formidable legacy of Rodrigo's parents, offering an unprecedented look at the private family life of a literary giant. It is at once a gift to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's loyal readers, and a grand act of generosity from a writer who knew the man better than most"-- Provided by publisher.
Burntcoat
A Novel
Published in 2021
"In an unnamed British city, the virus is spreading, and like everyone else, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness retreats inside. She isolates herself in her immense studio, Burntcoat, with Halit, the lover she barely knows. As life outside changes irreparably, inside Burntcoat, Edith and Halit find themselves changed as well: by the histories and responsibilities each carries and bears, by the fears and dangers of the world outside, and by the progressions of their new relationship"-- Provided by publisher
Mike Nichols
Published in 2021
A magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges?some of the worst largely unknown until now?by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind: while still in his twenties, he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Next he directed four consecutive hit plays, won back-to-back Tonys, ushered in a new era of Hollywood moviemaking with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and followed it with The Graduate , which won him an Oscar and became the third-highest-grossing movie ever. At thirty-five, he lived in a three-story Central Park West penthouse, drove a Rolls-Royce, collected Arabian horses, and counted Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, and Richard Avedon as friends. Where he arrived is even more astonishing given where he had begun: born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he and his younger brother were sent to America on a ship in 1939. The young immigrant boy caught very few breaks. He was bullied and ostracized?an allergic reaction had rendered him permanently hairless?and his father died when he was just twelve, leaving his mother alone and overwhelmed. The gulf between these two sets of facts explains a great deal about Nichols's transformation from lonely outsider to the center of more than one cultural universe?the acute powers of observation that first made him famous; the nourishment he drew from his creative partnerships, most enduringly with May; his unquenchable drive; his hunger for security and status; and the depressions and self-medications that brought him to terrible lows. It would take decades for him to come to grips with his demons. In an incomparable portrait that follows Nichols from Berlin to New York to Chicago to Hollywood, Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion. Among the 250 people Harris interviewed: Elaine May, Meryl Streep, Stephen Sondheim, Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Tom Hanks, Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson, Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Lorne Michaels, and Gloria Steinem. Mark Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always flattering, but its ultimate impact is to present the full story of one of the most richly interesting, complicated, and consequential figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. It is a triumph of the biographer's art.
My Monticello
Fiction
Published in 2021
"An irresistibly accessible yet startlingly bold book of short stories and a novella, inspired by Black lives in America and featuring the gripping eponymous work "My Monticello.""-- Provided by publisher.
Empire of Pain
The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Published in 2021
Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis.
The Renunciations
Poems
Published in 2021
"These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of "the oracle"--an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion endd--the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility"-- Provided by publisher.
Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?
Essays
Published in 2021
A young critic's essays on race and culture, from Toni Morrison to trap. -- adapted from back cover.
Cutlish
Published in 2021
"Rajiv Mohabir's Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word "home" and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, "They are vexed you survive; that you/rise up from the pavement..." But what I love most is read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: "Let's get one thing queer-I'm no Sabu-like sidekick,/I'm the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam//on the street. I don't speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian,/can't control minds, have no psychic powers." Jericho Brown Cutlish, Rajiv Mohabir's stunning new collection, asks urgent questions about queer identities, diaspora and silence. Deeply grounded in 1838, the year the first ships brought indentured servants from India to Guyana, Cutlish reckons with the relationship between language and violence. These poems challenge the colonizer's English through Creole, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani and Chutney songs, dazzling us at every turn: "May each face who ever said, Speak English / find their own tongue fettered and split, / my mixed blood blackening their faces." The book's title evokes the violence of a cutlass, and everywhere here we see language as knife and blade but also as solace. Cutlish is a luminous, beautiful book. Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most important poets writing today. --Nicole Cooley"-- Provided by publisher.
A Ghost in the Throat
Published in 2021
An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year - A Guardian Best Book of 2020 - Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize - Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. On discovering her murdered husband's body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh's life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet's girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh's erased life-and in doing so, discovers her own. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another's.
Detransition, Baby
A Novel
Published in 2020
A trans woman, her detransitioned ex, and his cisgender lover build an unconventional family together in the wake of heartbreak and an unplanned pregnancy.
The Family Roe
An American Story
Published in 2021
Reports on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart.
The Least of Us
True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
Published in 2021
From the best-selling author of Dreamland comes a searing follow-up that explores fentanyl and the quiet yet groundbreaking steps communities are taking to end the opioid crisis nationwide.
Concepcion
An Immigrant Family's Fortunes
Published in 2021
"A journalist's powerful and incisive account of the forces steering the fate of his sprawling Filipinx-American family reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience. Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the U.S., part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. As a rising tide of inequality and discrimination threatened to engulf her, her brother Spanky-a rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Franciso airport, his singing carrying no farther than a restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf-and others of their generation, he wondered whether their decision to abandon a middle-class existence in the Philippines had been worth the cost. Excavating his family's history back to the region's unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, Japanese occupation, and American intervention, Samaha fits his family's arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. And by relating their personal history with warmth and affection but also clear-eyed skepticism, 'Concepcion' explores what it might mean to reckon with imperialism's unjust legacy, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland"-- Provided by publisher.
Frank
Sonnets
Published in 2021
""The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of "beauty or relief." Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and--in a word--frank."--Publisher's website.
How the Word is Passed
A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Published in 2021
Examines the legacy of slavery by highlighting the continued preservation of monuments and landmarks that hold violent and racist symbolism.
Afterparties
Stories
Published in 2021
"A debut story collection about Cambodian-American life-immersive and comic, yet unsparing-that marks the arrival of an indisputable new talent in American fiction"-- Provided by publisher.
Orwell's Roses
Published in 2021
"A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. "In the spring of 1936 a man planted roses." That man was George Orwell, shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. This is the starting point for Rebecca Solnit's new book, which presents another side of Orwell, a neglected arcadian Orwell who took enormous pleasure in the natural world and found great meaning and value in it. Orwell's planting of the roses is an axle from which Solnit's chapters radiate out like spokes as she brilliantly explores its various contexts, perspectives, and meanings, following the contours of Orwell's life and tracking how deeply enmeshed the love of nature is in all his writing. Journeying to the cottage in Wallingford where Orwell lived in 1936, she examines his desire to be agrarian and settled, how gardening restored him, and how planting something can be an act of fidelity and faith. Probing at the beauty and meaning of roses, she draws in the revolutionary photography and politics of Tina Modotti and makes a clandestine visit to a Columbian rose factory, where 80% of America's roses for sale are grown. She tracks the history of gardening, showing how the desire to garden is culturally determined and often rooted in class, recounts the immense battles over breeding and genetics in Russia during Stalin's time, and probes into the colonialist roots of Orwell's forebears, who worked in opium production in India and profiteered from sugar and slavery in Jamaica. Solnit shows how these points of intersection illuminate Orwell's work, and how that illumination shines forth on larger questions about beauty, pleasure, meaning, relationship, and hope. Her book establishes that "Orwellian" could stand for something more than ominous, corrupt, and sinister"-- Provided by publisher.
The Right to Sex
Feminism in the Twenty-first Century
Published in 2021
"A work of nonfiction by philosopher Amia Srinivasan that upends the way we discuss-or avoid discussing-the problems and politics of sex"-- Provided by publisher.
Harlem Shuffle
Published in 2021
""Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger and bigger all the time. See, cash is tight, especially with all those installment plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace at the furniture store, Ray doesn't see the need to ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who also doesn't ask questions. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa -- the "Waldorf of Harlem" -- and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do, after all. Now Ray has to cater to a new clientele, one made up of shady cops on the take, vicious minions of the local crime lord, and numerous other Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he starts to see the truth about who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? Harlem Shuffle is driven by an ingeniously intricate plot that plays out in a beautifully recreated Harlem of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead"-- Provided by publisher.