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Here’s a rundown of this year’s best novels, non-fiction, poetry, translated and young adult literature.
Tips Poetry In Motion Dive Into The World Of Verse
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History And Science And Twists Of Magic: Dark Earth, By Rebecca Stott
Each year, the National Book Foundation nominates 25 books for the National Book Award. A celebration of the best of American literature, the nominations span fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and books for young adults. And every year since 2014, we’ve read them all to help our readers figure out which ones they might want to check out. Here are our thoughts on the 2021 nominees and winners.
It is so skillfully constructed that reading it feels like opening a watch to admire the watch. It’s not always clear what you’re looking at, but it’s undeniably impressive that someone was able to put all these gears and cogs together.
There are five main characters in this book and they exist in four different timelines. We start with a spaceship in the 22nd century. Turn the page and you’re in the Midwest in 2019. Turn the page again and you’re in 15th century Constantinople. Turn the page again and you are in Korea during the war.
Doerr’s clever plotting finally brings these characters and timelines together. But even before the satisfying conclusion, they are united by a single theme. Each of our protagonists lives in what they understand to be the end of the world. They each seek refuge in the same book: a lost comedy from ancient Greece that continues to emerge in history through luck and chance.
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Doerr’s built an elegant structure. It’s also way too long: In the time it takes to wrap up all five plotlines, a lot of urgency has been drained from the book, leaving the book’s long middle feeling choppy, rambling, and in dire need of a point. Additionally, the author seems very uncomfortable when it comes to writing women, even as minor characters. Still, Doerr’s tribute to the persistence of life and books in the face of apocalypse is heartwarming—and no matter what, it’s pretty cool to open its covers
, about a group of monks building a utopian community in 12th-century England, is the most purely sensual book I’ve read all year. Each series is rich with natural details, precise and refined: apricot flesh with “a little give like a tight girl’s thigh”. the monks’ voices as they read aloud “blend so beautifully that the impression is not a tapestry of individual threads but a solid sheet like hammered gold.”
, which takes its title from the Latin word for mother, is built around the real-life French poet Marie de France. Groff’s Marie is a painfully awkward 17-year-old girl when the novel opens, ugly and bad-tempered, but possessing both great strength and great ambition. She has been sent to a poor abbey in the middle of nowhere England on the grounds that she is too ugly to marry but decent enough to manage an estate. By sheer force of will, she transforms the cob abbey into an Eden of sorts: a safe haven for women, full of art and protected from violence, but always troubled by both the demands of male encroachment and Marie’s merciless plans for more. more, more.
Forward and keeps you turning the pages. But it’s her insistence on experiencing life through her body that really makes this novel special: The way Marie enjoys her physical strength, good food, sex, cool water after a hot flash. She’s an unforgettable character, and Groff evokes her point of view so strongly that it takes over your entire body. You don’t read this novel so much as immerse yourself in it, like being baptized.
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Can you fit an entire life into a thin little book? Hunt tried – and succeeded, beautifully –
, a deceptively simple book about the strange forces that shape a life. The title character, Zorrie Underwood, has lived most of her life in a rural community in Indiana, first as an orphan raised by an uncaring aunt, then as a drifter during the Depression, a wife, and finally a young widow who lives next door her. the neighbor Noah, who hides a tragedy in his heart. Hard work is all he’s ever known, but it’s far from the sum of who he is. Zorrie rejoices in the home she is making in Indiana: “the dirt from which she had blossomed, was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.”
A key, brief moment in Zorrie’s life—one that both blesses and haunts her—is the two months she spends in Illinois as a young woman, working for the Radium Dial Company painting clocks with glow-in-the-dark numbers. . She and the other young women there, especially her friends Jane and Marie, often lick their brushes, coated with a substance not yet known to be a potent carcinogen. The glow of this powder follows Zorrie through her life, marking her hopes, her fears, and ultimately her sense of meaning. Hunt’s novel reads like poetry, harks back to writers like Paul Harding and Marilynne Robinson, and radiates the warmth of a beating heart.
Is a powerful story of forbidden love between Isaiah and Samuel, two slaves in the South. “The two of them” can exist in the world they create for themselves in the barn at the edge of the plantation until they are finally betrayed. Jones Jr.’s work has garnered high praise for revealing what queer love might have been like for slaves.
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But it’s the gravitas of his prose—lyrical, unsettlingly clear, with the ability to evoke moments of intimacy or grand scale—that sets his work apart. It’s evident in the way Jones Jr. describes Isaiah and Samuel when they’re alone together: “each separate movement built upon the other to form something that seemed to sway to its own music, back and forth, like the sea.”
Almost every review of The Prophets mentions the late James Baldwin — and for good reason. Baldwin’s last wish was that someone could find something in the “debris” he left behind, in other words, that other writers could find inspiration in his work. In thanks for
, Jones Jr. thanks Baldwin and writes: “We did this.” Baldwin was nominated four times for a National Book Award, but never won. It would be encouraging to see Robert Jones Jr., who stands on Baldwin’s shoulders, receive the award.
It is a hellish journey, dark and full of anxiety. Half the book is a stream-of-consciousness narrative from an unnamed best-selling author who tells the reader that he has been haunted by hallucinations since childhood. The other half tells the story of a dark-haired boy (who may, or may not, be dead) referred to only by the name given to him by bullies: Soot.
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The unnamed author’s tenuous grasp of reality gives the book a dreamlike quality: it’s unclear whether what you’re reading is actually happening, an ambiguity reinforced by the fact that many of the author’s encounters seem too fantastical to be true. Chief among these are his regular visits from Soot, who becomes the author’s link to the horror of police brutality, something he would rather ignore.
Police brutality becomes a recurring theme in the book, as do other elements of the black American experience. Among other things, Jason Mott touches on loss, memory, race, colorism, family, love, and the United States. By taking such a broad aim, it isn’t really able to explore any of these topics in depth. Ideas blur into each other, the way the real and the unreal merge for the writer-narrator. The result is a strange, sad story, both elegant and meandering.
Shines especially. Divided not into sections or chapters but into “movements,” each part of this collection explores Black joy and pain while weaving in his own personal memories and thoughts about his life and the lives of other Black people who traverse American culture.
In a section on jazz star Josephine Baker, Abduraqib writes, “There are streets named after black people in every city in America. Most of the time, Black people are dead. Sometimes the street named after the dead black man doesn’t have many living black people on it.” Abdurraqib thrives on combining simple fact with significance, and in this book he paints larger-than-life pictures of memory and history.
W. S. Merwin
Black performance is presented in many ways – not only through music or dance or life, but also in the efforts that white people make to imitate it. A segment discussing the story of William Henry Lane, a performer about whom Charles Dickens wrote, soon gives way to a parallel: how black people are imitated on the Internet, and how this social creepiness has become normal because, well, it has become normalized from the beginning
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