A Word About Awards

CLOUDSPLITTER by Russell Banks   Nominations: NY Times Finalist 1998, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 1999, Pulitzer Finalist 1999   Date Read: December 30, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “An inordinately ambitious portrayal of the life and mission of abolitionist John Brown, from the veteran novelist whose previous fictional forays into American history include The New Worm (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (not reviewed). Banks's story takes the form of a series of lengthy letters written, 40 years after Brown's execution, by his surviving son Owen in response to the request of a professor (himself a descendant of William Lloyd Garrison) who is planning a biography of the antislavery martyr. Owen's elaborate tale, frequently interrupted by digressive analyses of his own conflicted feelings about his family's enlistment in their father's cause, traces a pattern of family losses and business failings that seemed only to heighten ""the Old Man's""...

LOST CITY RADIO by Daniel Alarcon   Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2007, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2008, Dublin Longlist 2009   Date Read: December 1, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “The host of a radio show finds herself increasingly tangled in the legacy of her country’s wearying history of war.   Like the dystopian settings of  Brave New World  and  1984 , the nation that Alarcón describes in his jarring and deeply imagined first novel feels at once anonymous and very familiar. Norma lives in the capital city of a South American nation that has spent ten years recovering from a long civil war that pitted the army against a failed cadre of rebels called the Illegitimate Legion. The reasons for the fighting are obscure, but Norma has become a national folk hero by helping to pick up the pieces; as the host of “Lost City Radio,” she reunites listeners with family members who were among the “disappeared” during the war. She’s not wholly disp...