A Word About Awards

THE RABBIT HUTCH by Tess Gunty   Awards: National Book Winner 2022   Nominations: Inside Literary Prize Finalist 2024, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2022   Date Read: January 10, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An ensemble of oddballs occupies a dilapidated building in a crumbling Midwest city.   An 18-year-old girl is having an out-of-body experience; a sleep-deprived young mother is terrified of her newborn’s eyes; someone has sabotaged a meeting of developers with fake blood and voodoo dolls; a lonely woman makes a living deleting comments from an obituary website; a man with a mental health blog covers himself in glow stick liquid and terrorizes people in their homes. In this darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing novel, there are perhaps too many overlapping plots to summarize concisely, most centering around an affordable housing complex called La Lapinière, or the Rabbit Hutch, located in the fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana. The novel has a playfu...

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres   Award: National Book Winner 2023 Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2025, Inside Literary Prize Finalist 2025, Los Angeles Times Finalist 2023, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2023, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2024   Date Read: November 25, 2023   The unnamed narrator of Blackouts has come to The Palace to be with a dear friend, Juan, as he dies. Fleeing a flooded kitchen, Juan provides No Name a place to stay in exchange for continuing his life’s work: completing a 1941 study called  Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns.   Between the two’s memories and education, they explore queer history and how this history has affected their own lives. Interspersed throughout the novel is redacted text from the study that forms more of a personal history between the lines or what Juan calls “…little poems of illumination.” The text was originally written by Jan Gay as an anthropological study in homosexuality but Dr. George Henry co-opted h...