Staff Picks
2023 National Book Critics Circle Award Winners
- Megan M.
- Friday, January 26
Collection
This year's winners include:
Fiction: I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
Nonfiction: We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian
Biography: Winnie and Nelson by Jonny Steinberg
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
We Were Once a Family
A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
Published in 2023
"The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children-and a searing indictment of the American foster care system"-- Provided by publisher.
Tremor
A Novel
Published in 2023
"A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis. Tunde, the man at the center of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life"-- Provided by publisher.
King
A Life
Published in 2023
"The first full biography in decades, "King" mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times"-- Provided by publisher.
Creep
Accusations and Confessions
Published in 2023
"A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society, in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them, from the acclaimed author of Mean, and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity" -- Publisher's website.
All Souls
Poems
Published in 2023
"In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. The poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carries us through the night's reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight--with its escapements and unbreakable numbers, "restless / irregular light and shadow, awakened"--can't appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Vibrating with a ghostly radioactive attentiveness, these poems record "a disturbance within the order of moments." Departure can't be stopped, but tenderness, courage, refusal, and acceptance infuse this work, arresting and in some ways fixing time"--Page 4 of cover.
The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative
Published in 2023
"A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr."-- Provided by publisher.
Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique
The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism
Published in 1998
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
A Journey Through the Deep State
Published in 2023
"Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections--a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Howley's subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life"-- Provided by publisher.
Daughter of the Dragon
Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History
Published in 2023
The story of Anna May Wong, who fought virulent anti-Chinese xenophobia, unabashed sexism, cinematic exploitation and ageism that defined American culture in the 20th century to became Hollywood's first Chinese American film star.
Doppelganger
A Trip into the Mirror World
Published in 2023
"What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self―a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times."--Amazon.com.
North Woods
A Novel
Published in 2023
"When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive"-- Provided by publisher.
Secret Harvests
A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm
Published in 2023
I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family-especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.
Who Gets Believed?
When the Truth Isn't Enough
Published in 2023
Why are honest asylum seekers dismissed as liars? Former refugee and award-winning author Dina Nayeri begins with this question, turning to shocking and illuminating case studies in this book, which grows into a reckoning with our culture's views on believability. From persuading a doctor that she'd prefer a C-section to learning to "bullshit gracefully" at McKinsey to struggling, in her personal life, to believe her troubled brother-in-law, Nayeri explores an aspect of our society that is rarely held up to the light. For fans of David Grann, Malcolm Gladwell, and Atul Gawande, Who Gets Believed? is a book as deeply personal as it is profound in its reflections on morals, language, human psychology, and the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.
Vengeance is Mine
Published in 2023
"From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer's childhood"-- Provided by publisher.
Trace Evidence
Poems
Published in 2023
"In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection's center sits "On the Overnight from Agadir," a poem that chronicles the poet's survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother's birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and themysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally by the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for true intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires"-- Provided by publisher.
The Undertow
Scenes from a Slow Civil War
Published in 2023
"One of America's finest reporters and essayists explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart. Across the country, men "of God" glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war--a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals. Framing this dangerous vision, Sharlet remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community, and of an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all"-- Provided by publisher.
Ordinary Notes
Published in 2023
Told through a series of 248 notes, this volume explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake of it, touching upon such themes as language, beauty, memory, history and literature.
How to Say Babylon
A Memoir
Published in 2023
This stunning story of the author's struggle to break free of her strict Rastafarian upbringing ruled by a father whose rigid beliefs, rage and paranoia led to violence shows how found her own power and provides a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we know little about.
Blackouts
A Novel
Published in 2023
"Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book--Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns--and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time"--Dust jacket flap.
Story of a Poem
Published in 2023
Matthew Zapruder had an idea: to write a poem as slowly and intentionally as possible, to preserve its drafts, and record the painstaking, elusively transcendent stuff of its construction. It would be the end cap to a new collection of poetry, and a means to process modern American life in a time of political turmoil, mega fires, and sobriety. What Zapruder didn't anticipate was that this literary project would reveal a deeply personal aspect as well: a way to resolve the unexplored pain and unexpected joys he was confronting in the wake of his son's diagnosis with autism. The result is a remarkable piece of writing, one that explores not just what it means to be a poet and father, but also what it means to be alive on this planet during this turbulent and extraordinary time. By comparing the writing of a poem with his own tangled evolution as a son, husband and father, Zapruder unfolds moments of his own life in the reflection of an increasingly uncanny world. With a wide range of reference points-from Celan, Li Bai and Frank O'Hara to Whitman, Merwin and Rupi Kaur-we join Zapruder on a poet's journey; that in some alchemy of literature, becomes a journey of our own. Ultimately, the poet asks us to join with him in the search for a crucial answer. In his words: "What world can we imagine, and then make, where we all can live?" With Story of a Poem celebrated poet Matthew Zapruder offers a personal, deeply unguarded examination of a poet's eternal struggle to transform a moment of feeling into verse, as well as a subtle and enthralling roadmap to the practice of poetry and finding its threads in everyday life.