Some want escapist reads to distract themselves during these times, while others are turning to books that lean into the darkness and dread of the pandemic.
Christy Lefteri's novel of the Syrian refugee crisis won the third annual award, which doles out $35,000 for fiction that illuminates a pressing social issue.
The annual award, doled out in partnership with NPR, honors fiction that doesn't shy from grappling with thorny social issues. Just one of the five books remaining will win $35,000 come April.
The novelist and poet joined Sarah M. Broom, László Krasznahorkai, Ottilie Mulzet, and Martin W. Sandler as winners Wednesday night — receiving $10,000 and a medallion for their front covers.
The literary prize, which honors fiction that tackles tough social issues, has announced a longlist of 16 titles. The nominees for the $35,000 prize include some big names and plenty of debuts.
The shortlists this year include Marlon James, Susan Choi, Carolyn Forché, Jason Reynolds and more than two dozen other authors and translators. Winners in five categories will be unveiled next month.
Colson Whitehead and Marlon James headline the longlists of names in contention for the literary prize. Altogether, 50 books across five categories stand a chance at winning in November.
Atwood made the list for her sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, and Rushdie for his reimagining of Don Quixote. Chigozie Obioma, Elif Shafak, Lucy Ellmann and Bernardine Evaristo round out the finalists.
An American Marriage won the nearly $40,000 award, once known as the Orange Prize, at a ceremony Tuesday in London. "We all loved this brilliant book," the judges said.
The novel earned Jones the $35,000 award for tackling difficult social issues in fiction. The prize's head judge says the book is "going to have a place in the literary imagination for a long time."
Five books remain in the running: Tommy Orange's There There; Tayari Jones' An American Marriage; David Chariandy's Brother; Jennifer Clement's Gun Love; and Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
The National Book Foundation winnowed the list of contenders for its literary prize to just 20 — or five finalists each in four categories. Among them are Jesmyn Ward, Min Jin Lee and Frank Bidart.
Young children have an easier time exporting what they learn from a fictional storybook to the real world when the storybook is realistic, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson and Rita Dove are just three of the authors on the shortlists for the National Book Awards. The 20 books still in contention for the prizes were unveiled Thursday.
And then there were 40: This week, the National Book Foundation revealed the writers who are still in contention for its literary prize. It capped the rollout Thursday with the fiction nominees.
Kayla Miller, a UNLV masters candidate in writing, has won the Five Quarterly e-chapbook prize. The online publication is a magazine for new literary...
Two missionaries, a straitlaced Brazilian and his brash American companion, forge an unlikely friendship as they try to win souls in South America. That relationship, between Elders Passos and McLeod, is at the heart of the new novel Elders, by Ryan McIlvain.
If you like adventures in exotic locales, Laura van den Berg is your kind of writer. Her stories are set in far-flung locales like Madagascar, Congo and the Amazon Jungle.
"Rural Finland may not seem like a very likely locale for a gripping intellectual thriller," writes one literary critic, but Maile Chapman certainly makes it so.
The UNLV writing fellow joins us to talk about her debut novel about women locked in a sanatorium and why it took her 10 years to write. More
