A Word About Awards

ALL FOURS by Miranda July   Nominations: LA Times Finalist 2024, National Book Finalist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2024, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2025, Women’s Prize Finalist 2025   Date Read: March 28, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man. According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides...

JAZZ by Toni Morrison   Award: Nobel Winner 1992   Nomination: NY Times Finalist 1992   Date Read: March 27, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Morrison, in her sixth novel, enters 1926 Harlem, a new black world then ("safe from fays [whites] and the things they think up"), and moves into a love story—with a love that could clear a space from the past, give a life or take one. At 50, Joe Trace—good-looking, faithful to wife Violet, also from Virginia poor times—suddenly tripped into a passionate affair with Dorcas, 18: "one of those deep-down spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." Then Violet went to Dorcas's funeral and cut her dead face. But before Joe met Dorcas, and before her death and before Violet, in her torn coat, scoured the neighborhood looking for reasons, looking for her own truer identity, images of the past burned within all three: Violet's mother, tipped out of her chair by the men who took everyth...

THE MAID’S VERSION by Daniel Woodrell   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2015, LA Times Finalist 2013   Date Read: March 20, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  grandson becomes obsessed with his grandmother’s story about a small-town disaster from many years ago. Set in the Ozarks, the book is inspired by history and is far less noir-tinged than the author's earlier works ( The Outlaw Album , 2011, etc.). Loosely based on the real-life West Plains Dance Hall Explosion of 1928, it centers on Alma DeGeer Dunahew, a maid with three children in fictional West Table, Mo. After years of bitter silence, Alma has chosen to unburden her story on her grandson, Alek. “Alma DeGeer Dunahew, with her pinched, hostile nature, her dark obsessions and primal need for revenge, was the big red heart of our family, the true heart, the one we keep secret and that sustains us,” Alek says. Alma’s younger sister Ruby may be a bit wayward, but Alma cherishes her. When Ruby is killed along with...

JAMES by Percival Everett   Awards: Carnegie Winner 2025, Kirkus Winner 2024, National Book Winner 2024   Nominations: Aspen Words Finalist 2025, Booker Finalist 2024, Dublin Finalist 2025, Goodreads Finalist 2024, LA Times Finalist 2024, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2024, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2025, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2025   Date Read: March 19, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Mark Twain's  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember. This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the t...

THE WHITE BOOK by Han Kang   Award: Nobel Prize   Nomination: Booker Finalist 2018   Date Read: March 14, 2025   From Wikipedia: “ The setting is in post-World War II Warsaw, Poland. The book has been described as "a fragmented autobiographical meditation on the death of the unnamed narrator’s baby sister, who died two hours after her birth." The novel uses an unconventional narrative and short meditations on the color white to discuss grief, loss, and the fragile nature of the human spirit. Kang describes a total of 65 white objects in the book, including rice,   sugar cubes, and breast milk. ”

MAGNIFICENCE by Lydia Millet Nominations: LA Times Finalist 2012, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2012 Date Read: March 10, 2025 From Kirkus Reviews: “Mi llet’s conclusion of the trilogy that includes  How the Dead Dream   (2008) and  Ghost Lights   (2011) draws a detailed map of the healing process of an adulterous wife who suddenly finds herself a widow. Susan’s husband, Hal, goes to Belize in search of Susan’s employer ,T., a real estate tycoon who has gone missing. (Spoiler alert: Readers of the earlier novels who don’t want to know what happens to T. or Hal, stop reading now.) Hal’s quest is successful: T. returns to Los Angeles. But he’s alone, because Hal has been fatally knifed in a mugging. Susan is both grief- and guilt-stricken. She genuinely loved Hal but has been seeking sex with other men ever since a car accident left their daughter, Casey, a paraplegic. She believes Hal went to Belize largely to recover after discovering her infidelity. Millet’s...

SERIOUS MEN by Manu Joseph   Award: PEN/Open Book Winner 2011   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2012   Date Read: March 9, 2025   From The New York Times: “To the list you can add Arvind Acharya and Ayyan Mani, the hero and anti­hero (you decide which is which) of Manu Joseph’s smart and funny first novel, “Serious Men.” Arvind is a legendary astro­physicist, a perennial Nobel candidate banned from the Vatican for having whispered something naughty in the pope’s ear. He lords over the faculty at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai like a cantankerous octogenarian enduring a horde of particularly ungrateful grandchildren. The man’s idea of sentimentality is using his wife’s name as his e-mail password. Ayyan is Arvind’s personal assistant at the institute, a wily sweeper’s son of the untouchable caste with an affinity for mischief equaled only by his aptitude for it. He eavesdrops on all of Arvind’s conversations, subverts every order he’s given and posts, each...

IMPERIAL CAESAR by Rex Warner   Award: James Tait Black Winner 1960   Date Read: March 4, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ When The Young Caesar was reviewed back in 1958 and commended as biographical historical fiction of a high order, we expressed the hope that there would be a sequel, since the story stopped with the Gallic Wars. Here is the sequel, which carries on the record through the conquest of the Germans, his invasion of Britain, the crossing of the Rubicon, the Battle of Pharsalia against Pompey, the amorous affair with Cleopatra, his campaigns in Africa and Spain -- up to the Ides of March, when, sleepless, he knew forebodings of death. The story is set in the frame of his reassessment of these years, his memory sharpened by insomnia. And the style holds closely to the mood and expression of Caesar's own writings of his campaigns. It has the same terse style, concern with facts, ruthless self criticism- all recognized as Caesar's outstanding literary qualities, ...

OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA by Julia Armfield   Nominations: BookTube Longlist 2023, Carnegie Longlist 2023   Date Read: March 2, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ What happens to a marriage when one spouse is no longer the person you married? Leah and Miri lead a conventional married life of comfortable routine, shared love of movies, and happiness at having found each other. Then Leah, a marine scientist, embarks on a three-week submarine expedition during which things seem to go disastrously wrong, and she and her shipmates disappear for six months at the very bottom of the ocean. Miri’s narrative and excerpts from Leah’s diary of the mission relate their growing awareness—and grudging management—of the changes and relationship losses they both endure as a result of their prolonged separation. When Leah returns home, things do not go as Miri had envisioned; her unanticipated transformation—a terrifying dissolution of her human form into something unfamiliar and strange—challen...