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2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:34:19 GMT

A week ago National Book Critics Circle announced its 2021 nominees in multiple categories (see link below). For the second year in a row I am a judge of the John Leonard Prize for a first book, and I have known which titles are finalists for that prize for several weeks but was not at liberty to share that information until a week ago. Last year there were seven finalists of which I had already read all five fiction titles and knew which of those I thought was superior to the others (reading the non-fiction titles did not change my estimation), and in the end my fellow judges agreed and awarded the 2020 Leonard Prize to Luster by Raven Leilani.

The 2021 John Leonard Prize finalists are

Ashley C. Ford, Somebody’s Daughter (Flatiron Books)

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello (Henry Holt)

Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby (One World)

Larissa Pham, Pop Song (Catapult)

Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties (Ecco)

Devon Walker-Figueroa, Philomath (Milkweed Editions)

and it will be a far more difficult decision. Going in I had read two of the six titles, and now that I have read five and am reading the sixth, I find that I will have to reread some of them to decide which will get my vote. So for now I recommend adding all six to your TBR lists. Of the finalists in the other categories the only one I've read is Second Place by Rachel Cusk, which I also recommend.

2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists

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Brandon Taylor on D.H. Lawrence & moral fiction

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 19:40:41 GMT

Brandon Taylor: On D.H. Lawrence & moral fiction

“It all sounds very abstract, I know. But for me, it comes down to this: moral fiction is not fiction that affirms your ideology about power systems and oppression. It does not make you feel like a good and righteous person. It may have no lessons for you to tweet about or put on Instagram or explain readily, wittily at dinner parties. You can’t wear it like a hair shirt and you can’t always articulate its particular force or power upon you. Moral art is, I think, hard to describe. Instable. It is art that implicates and complicates your notions of good and bad. Moral art may call you a liar to your face. It reveals the shallowness of your thought. It challenges you, but not in the way of an all-fiber diet. In the way gravity challenges you. In the way the thin air at the top of a mountain challenges you. In the way the pressure of the deep seas challenges you. Moral does not mean good or lawful. Moral means true. Moral means you take your finger off the scale.

“To make moral art, moral fiction, is to get out of the way. To make moral art is to admit one’s humble place in the order of things. I think moral fiction is less about signaling to the reader that you voted for the right people or that you are able to listen to people who would have you destroyed. Moral fiction does not signal. That is propaganda. That is social work. Not that these are unimportant things, but they are not art. And they are not moral.”

#moral fiction #brandon taylor #d.h. lawrence #moral art

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Catullus Sails to China, Four Poems by John Yau

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 18:50:54 GMT

Catullus Sails to China, Four Poems by John Yau (thanks to John Madera who published them in Big Other in 2019 and posted this link in Small Press News on the poet's birthday)

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2020 NBCC Winners

Tue, 11 May 2021 22:23:57 GMT

This past winter I was one of 30 judges of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for a first book. In March NBCC announced that the book I voted for, Luster by Raven Leilani, won the Leonard Prize. One of my fellow judges, Natalie Bakopoulos says, “On behalf of the NBCC membership, we are honored and delighted to present the John Leonard Prize to Raven Leilani for her brilliant novel, Luster. Luster’s artistry, wit, and narrative surprises make it a tremendous achievement, and its tender and raucous prose mirrors the narrator’s tender and raucous self.” Leonard judge Adam Dalva adds, “Luster is a compulsive book—compulsive to read, with compulsive, complex characters—that brilliantly captures the essence of its lead, Edie. She is a wonderfully depicted swirl of painting, video games, and longing.”

Other 2020 NBCC winners include Nicole R. Fleetwood, who won the criticism award for Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard Univ. Press). Committee chair J. Howard Rosier calls the book “Profoundly revisionist,” as it “identifies the conditions under which incarcerated persons create art and taxonomizes its making.”

francine j. harris was awarded the poetry prize for Here Is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which, judge Megan Labrise says, gives the reader a “gentle caress, a gut punch, a come-hither curved finger, a rib-tickler, and a stop-sign palm,” sometimes “all five at once.” By “exploring femininity, blackness, queerness, nature, and institutions (political, academic, and disciplinary),” Labrise says, these poems “have the power to move.”

Cathy Park Hong won the prize in autobiography for Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World). Committee chair Marion Winik says, “Hong’s endlessly interesting blend of personal storytelling and cultural criticism digs into the personal to find the political, untangling the knots of privilege, envy, dissatisfaction, humiliation, and difference.”
The winner in the fiction category is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf), in which the author imagines Shakespeare’s son Hamnet’s death from bubonic plague, lonely and agonizing yet marked by courage. O’Farrell “brings the boy so vividly to life the reader is stricken by his loss,” says judge Colette Bancroft.

The biography prize went to Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley (Scribner). “Through the life of one persistent, defiant woman, Amy Stanley reveals the sweep of 19th century Japan, how the tiny fishing village of Edo became the global city Tokyo,” says committee chair Elizabeth Taylor.

Nonfiction recipient Tom Zoellner’s Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Harvard Univ. Press) “engagingly excavates shrouded history,” says judge Carlin Romano, to show how “heroic Jamaican freedom fighters catalyzed the end of slavery in the British Empire,” and in the process “restores these martyrs to their rightful place in the pantheon of justice.”

The recipient of the 2020 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to an NBCC member for exceptional critical work, was Jo Livingstone, culture staff writer at the New Republic, where they primarily contribute book criticism in addition to film and music coverage. Their writing has also recently appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Bookforum. Committee chair Colette Bancroft says, “Livingstone submitted a collection of three reviews of books that ranged from Samantha Irby’s earthy and hilarious personal essays to Christopher Chitty’s deeply researched history of the relationship between sexuality and capital, with a bounce into the thorny autofiction of the latest Martin Amis novel. In each case Livingstone brought to bear keen intelligence, wide-ranging knowledge, surprising perceptions and beautiful writing.”

The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was The Feminist Press. For 50 years, the Feminist Press has been at the forefront of activism for women’s equality. The Feminist Press started by publishing influential works that had been out of print, including, crucially, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper, now widely considered a classic of American literature. Over the years, they’ve published books by Anita Hill, Grace Paley, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Pussy Riot. They also publish Women’s Studies Quarterly, the influential journal that was established by the press in 1972. They remain on the vanguard of the feminist movement, and continue to publish essential works of American and international literature, including recent critically acclaimed books by Emily Hashimoto and Juliana Delgado Lopera, an unearthed classic by Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West, and one of this year’s finalists in the NBCC’s criticism category, Grieving by Cristina Rivera Garza. Committee chair Michael Schaub says: “[The Press’s] mission statement reads, ‘Celebrating our legacy, we lift up insurgent and marginalized voices from around the world to build a more just future,’ and that’s exactly what they’ve done. Their literature over the past five decades has made the world a better place for everyone.”

All 2020 NBCC prize winners are listed here: https://www.bookcritics.org/awards/ #Bookcritics.org #leonardprize

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2020 John Leonard Prize Finalists

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 00:11:05 GMT

It turns out only one of the six books I nominated for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for a first book is a finalist (some years none of my nominees make it to the next round), and that book is Luster by Raven Leilani. This year there are seven finalists for Leonard Prize; Luster and the other six are listed in the following link as are the other 2020 NBCC awards finalists: This year I am a judge for the Leonard Prize and have read six of the seven finalists and am 2/3 through the seventh. I have until the beginning of March to decide which title will get my vote. #nationalbookcriticscircle bookcritics.org #bookawards #johnleonardprize

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Travelogues by Poets

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 17:33:32 GMT

The Diaries of Lea Goldberg translated by Tsipi Keller. The Hebrew poet's
travelogue of her 1937 trip to Italy

If you like travel blogs by poets try this one by National Poetry Series
winner Karen Swenson.

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Brief review: The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:09:13 GMT

I'm taking a break from reading and reviewing new books to catch up with some old ones on my TBR list. I'm also trying to improve my Hebrew and am currently reading and enjoying the Hebrew edition of Ya'akov Shabtai's unfinished last novel סוף דבר (published in English as Past Perfect).

In circumstances when I cannot read with my eyes I read with my ears. I just finished listening to the audiobook of The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin, a writer of whom I became aware while reading his friend William H. Gass while preparing to review The William H. Gass Reader. My brief review of The Rabbi of Lud appears on Goodreads.

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Book review: Muck by Dror Burstein

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 22:13:10 GMT

“... readers will enjoy this funny, imaginative, and handsomely crafted novel first and foremost as a memorable work of literature, and as such it deserves to reach a wide audience.” -- From my review of Muck by Dror Burstein in New York Journal of Books

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Book review: The William H. Gass Reader

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 19:16:52 GMT

"According to Gass a total aesthete reduces everything to style; the centrality of moral and ethical issues in his writing proves that Gass is not merely an aesthete. Whether or not they agree with him his readers will never be cognitively malnourished, and his poetic prose is a joy to read even when its vision is pessimistic." -- From my review of The William H. Gass Reader in New York Journal of Books

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Book review: Late Beauty: Poems by Tuvia Ruebner

Fri, 11 May 2018 20:31:57 GMT

"Readers who devoured In the Illuminated Dark will welcome the additional poems in Late Beauty, and for readers unacquainted with Ruebner’s poetry Late Beauty provides a portal." -- From my review of Late Beauty: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz and Shahar Bram in New York Journal of Books.

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Book review: The Diamond Setter

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 17:37:53 GMT

"well written, masterfully translated by Jessica Cohen, and rewards rereading." -- From my review of The Diamond Setter by Moshe Sakal in New York Journal of Books

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Book Review: Petty Business by Yirmi Pinkus

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 18:13:14 GMT

"Petty Business, the second of Yirmi Pinkus’ five novels and the first to be published in English, satirically portrays the life of a family of Tel Aviv store owners with both fondness and humor over one year—1989, a time in which neighborhood mom and pop stores were being put out of business by larger chain and department stores, just as the latter are now under pressure from Internet vendors.

"... The novel’s title in the original Hebrew edition is the Aramaic phrase Bi’zer Anpin, which means 'on a small scale, in miniature,' and this family and their enterprises are a microcosm of a lower-middle class retail subculture at the end of an era.

"Overseas Pinkus is better known as cartoonist, and his book cover illustration of bathers in the waterpark swimming pool provides a preview of his satirical take on that subculture whose narrative portrait is also poignant. Pinkus’ mastery of language is every bit equal to that of his visual medium, and translators Evan Fallenberg and Yardena Greenspan do a fine job of conveying his varied prose into English." -- from my review of Petty Business by Yirmi Pinkus in New York Journal of Books

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Book review: The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 20:03:13 GMT

"One of the lessons this complicated book conveys is how difficult it is to achieve the golden mean, balancing a serious writer’s need for solitude to reduce distractions with the need to stay connected and involved with one’s family and loved ones on the one hand, and integrating knowledge and appreciation for global culture with an intimate involvement with one’s particular tradition and civilization on the other. If the consequences of failing to achieve those balances are not as dire for most of us as they are for Andrew, nonetheless many of us would benefit from a closer examination and recalibration. Extending the metaphor on a national and international scale to include the 9/11 attack may seem like a stretch, or is it?" -- From my review of The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar in New York Journal of Books

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Book review: North Station by Bae Suah

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 19:41:45 GMT

"One way to view these stories is as philosophical essays in fictional form that address some of the same philosophical, psychological, spiritual, aesthetic, cultural, and societal topics and concerns that are found in Bae’s longer fiction. But by devoting each story to only two or three of those topics and freed from a longer work’s overarching narrative the stories address those issues in even greater depth and convey them with poetic prose of comparable beauty to that found in her previous books in English translation. Compared to them this book has an even higher degree of difficulty—with abrupt linguistic changes in voice, number, and/or gender and multiple starting, stopping, and resuming narrative threads—that demand highly focused concentration but like them reward rereading." -- From my review of North Station by Bae Suah in New York Journal of Books

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Book Review: Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:24:11 GMT

"Though Moving Kings is considerably shorter and more accessible—with less erudite but nonetheless stimulating vocabulary, similes, and fewer stream of consciousness run-on sentences—than Cohen’s previous novel Book of Numbers (also reviewed on NYJB) it, too, skillfully weaves descriptive character portraits and plot lines into a novel of ideas that addresses issues as diverse as capitalism, gentrification, army veterans, the IDF’s conduct in the West Bank, and Jewish identity with sharp sardonic humor." -- from my review in New York Journal of Books

Also see Lit Hub's interview with Cohen about the novel

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