A Word About Awards

FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE By Taffy Brodesser-Akner   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2020, National Book Longlist 2019, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2019, Women’s Prize Longlist 2020   Date Read: August 6, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ It's not like Fleishman's estranged wife, a high-powered talent agent, was ever a very involved mother. But now she's dropped off the kids—while he was  asleep —and disappeared. New York Times Magazine  staff writer Brodesser-Akner's debut novel tracks Manhattan hepatologist Toby Fleishman through a painful divorce whose sting is mitigated somewhat by the wonders of his dating app. "Toby changed his search parameters to thirty-eight to forty-one, then forty to fifty, what the hell, and it was there that he found his gold mine: endlessly horny, sexually curious women who knew their value, who were feeling out something new, and whose faces didn't force him to have existential questions about youth and responsibility." A...

JAMES by Percival Everett   Awards: Carnegie Winner 2025, Kirkus Winner 2024, National Book Winner 2024, Pulitzer Winner 2025   Nominations: Aspen Words Finalist 2025, Booker Finalist 2024, BookTube Finalist 2025, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2025, 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 wit...

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...

AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN by Rabih Alameddine   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2016, National Book Finalist 2014, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2014, PEN/Open Book Finalist 2015   Date Read: July 9, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  72-year-old Beiruti woman considers her life through literature in an intimate, melancholy and superb tour de force. Alameddine has a predilection for highly literary conceits in his novels:  I, the Divine  (2001) is constructed out of the discarded first chapters of its heroine’s memoir, while his 2008 breakthrough,  The Hakawati , nests stories within stories lush with Arab lore. This book has a similarly artificial-seeming setup: Aaliya is an aging woman who for decades has begun the year translating one of her favorite books into Arabic. (Her tastes run toward the intellectual titans of 20th-century international literature, including W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano, Joseph Roth, Vladimir Nabokov and Fernando Pessoa.) T...

THE BOOKS OF JACOB by Olga Tokarczuk   Award: Nobel Prize 2022   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2022, Kirkus Finalist 2022, National Book Longlist 2022, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2022   Date Read: May 23, 2024   “If God is all things, then evil is a part of God.”   “Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word  disappear  comes from the root word  elem , and the site of that disappearance is known as  olam: world . Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.”   From Kirkus Reviews: “A charismatic figure traverses Europe, followers in tow.   The latest novel by the Polish No...

HOME by Marilynne Robinson   Awards: LA Times Winner 2008, Women’s Prize Winner 2009   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2010, National Book Finalist 2008, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2008, Oprah’s Book Club 2021   Date Read: March 10, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  companion volume to Robinson’s luminous, Pulitzer-winning novel  Gilead  (2004).   The focus here shifts from John Ames,  Gilead’s  memorable protagonist, to his lifelong best friend Robert Boughton. A widowed, increasingly frail and distracted former Presbyterian minister, Boughton has eight children scattered across the country. The story unfolds after two of them come home to Gilead, Iowa: Glory, the unmarried youngest, who has resigned her teaching job so she can care for Robert; and ne’er-do-well Jack, who for 20 years has repeatedly broken his father’s indulgent heart with his irresponsible, sometimes criminal behavior and—worse—his absence. “Why did he leave? Whe...

FALCONER by John Cheever   Nominations: National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1977, NY Times Finalist 1977   Date Read: February 13, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ It is many years since we left the Steuben glasshouse world that was, so unmistakably, Cheerer country. Via Bullet Park, a gentler, more vulnerable book than this, he introduced his broader and deeper ranging metaphysics of life and death, always in mysterious tandem. They're constants here in Falconer prison where Farragut, 734-508-32, a fratricide and a drug addict, is serving a zip to ten sentence. The drug he really hopes to find is a "distillate of earth, air, water, and fire." While Farragut reflects on his mortality and courts "death's dark simples," filth and degeneracy—redolent of Genet—are all around him. The Valley, for instance, is a urinal trough where you really go to relieve other needs unless you've turned homosexual. Farragut is briefly drawn to Jody, indicted on 53 counts, Jod...

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...

BURNTCOAT by Sarah Hall   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2023, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2021   Date Read: December 10, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “ The author of  Madame Zero  (2017) and  The Wolf Border  (2015) turns her attention to the pandemic.   “Those who tell stories survive.” This is something Edith Harkness’ mother told her, and it’s the opening line of the book her creator started writing when the United Kingdom went into lockdown in March 2020. This novel was born of a pandemic and is, obliquely, about a pandemic. Its protagonist has lived through and still lives with a world-historical disease, and Hall has earned a place in literary history as one of the first fiction writers to respond in a sustained way to Covid-19. The story is narrated by Edith and addressed to the lover with whom she sheltered from a deadly virus. This summary is available to anyone who reads a synopsis of the novel, but the author takes her time reve...

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...

MOONGLOW by Michael Chabon   Nominations: Carnegie Finalist 2017, Dublin Longlist 2018, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2016   Date Read: September 25, 2023   Moonglow is the fictional account of Chabon’s grandfather in all his real and imagined glory. Having lived an unconventional and eventful life, Chabon attempts to discover his grandfather’s secrets and motivations for his decisions.   Grandfather married a French woman he met during WWII. He helped to raise this woman’s daughter, who wasn’t his biological child. He stayed by his wife’s side when she literally lost her mind and was in and out of a mental hospital. He served time in prison for attempted murder when he attacked his boss after he was informed he was being let go. He began an entirely new career in his retirement making models of spacecraft for NASA. And in his widowhood he fell in love with a neighbor, giving her his whole heart.   These accounts are presented as a deathbed confession of...

A FROLIC OF HIS OWN by William Gaddis   Award: National Book Winner 1994   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 1996, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1994, NY Times Finalist 1994   Date Read: April 28, 2023   In A Frolic Of His Own, Gaddis plays with the idea of art vs. money, as well as the law vs. justice. Oscar, a buffoon and a recluse, believes the legal system is his recourse for a car accident he had where his own car ran him over. He has also written a play about the Civil War that he believes has been stolen to use as the basis for a Hollywood epic. He is suing about that as well. While the accident lawsuit isn’t successful because he’s the claimant and the defendant, his lawsuit against the Hollywood producer is successful. But at what cost?   Hobbling around in his Appellate Court Justice father’s dilapidated estate, Oscar goes on rants and drinking binges while bemoaning his lot in life. Christina, his stepsister, ping-pongs between assuaging Oscar’s ti...

DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA by Joan Chase   Award: PEN/Hemingway Winner 1984   Nominations: National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1983, NY Times Finalist 1983   Date Read: February 25, 2023   Told from the perspective of the daughters of a large, multi-generational family, these daughters convey the history of the Krauss family, led by Gram, the matriarch. Gram is nicknamed the Queen of Persia and she reigns over the house and farm, having inherited a great deal of money from her brother. She never fails to lord her ownership over Grandad, a man she had always been ill-matched with.   Gram is the mother of five daughters and her house has 14 bedrooms, which allows the daughters and their kids to move in and out with ease, only needing to sidestep the glare of their mother’s watchful eyes. Gram is prickly, sour and finally at the stage of life where she can put her own desires first, going out every night to bingo or the movies or bizarres – whatever ...

THE EASTER PARADE by Richard Yates   Nominations: National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1976, NY Times Finalist 1976   Date Read: February 17, 2023   Two bright, young sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, are set for a life of misery. How do we know? The very first line of The Easter Parade states, “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life." Although Yates gives up the ghost even before getting going, I was still compelled to continue to figure out how these bright and hopeful young women would end up so miserable.     Although I haven’t read Yates previously, his resounding themes of loneliness and the middle class struggle for fulfillment are indeed witnessed in the Grimes’ struggle for happiness and lives of meaning.    Sarah takes a conventional path in her life, marrying early and punching out three boys in quick succession. Yates doesn’t linger on the joys of life – the initial ecstasy of young love, the highs and lows of motherhood, the...

DISGRACE by J.M. Coetzee   Awards: Booker Award 1999, Nobel Winner 1999   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2001, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1999, NY Times Finalist 1999   Read Date: January 8, 2023   An older, twice-divorced professor living in South Africa finds himself embroiled in a scandal. Dr. David Lurie, by no means past his prime, has randomly found himself besotted with one of his students. His downfall? She makes herself available to him, never saying no. Then again, she never seems to enjoy their brief encounters and basically endures all of their liaisons. I never understood why she would go along with this unless she felt her academic future was in jeopardy if she didn’t comply?   Regardless, Coetzee has created another masterpiece here, diverting readers with this preliminary affair. After the student files a complaint with the university, David’s secret is laid bare for all his colleagues to dissect. In disgrace (hence the title), he resign...

EILEEN by Otessa Moshfegh   Award: PEN/Hemingway Winner 2016   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2016, Center For Fiction Longlist 2015, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2015   Date Read: October 9, 2022   “Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with goo-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”   Eileen Dunlop is invisible. She wears odd, mismatched clothes, has a plain face and is able to fade into crowds without anyone realizing she’s gone. In other words, Eileen has no one in her life who loves her. She has no friends, no partner, no mother and a father that is constantly fall-down drunk. She is resentful and self-loathing.   Eileen works at a juvenile detention center called Moorehouse. She has worked there a long time and yet it seems as if she’s new. None of her colleag...

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER by Jamaica Kincaid   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 1998, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1996, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 1997,  Women's Prize Longlist 1997   Date Read: September 21, 2022   Xuela Richardson was born never knowing her mother. She died giving birth to her, leaving her existence a mystery. The little she knows about her mother have been handed to Xuela in small stories and trinkets of her existence.   Xuela’s father, recognizing he wasn’t capable of raising an infant on his own hands Xuela off to his laundress to raise. The laundress treated her as a slave, never honoring her personhood, never offering love or comfort. In this cold environment that focused on survival, Xuela became enchanted with nature, with color, with the deliciousness of the physical world and, most importantly, her changing body.   The one gift Xuela’s corrupt father gave her is the benefit of an education. At a time when only boys went to ...

A DISTANT SHORE by Caryl Phillips   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2003, Dublin Longlist 2005, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2003, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2004   Date Read: August 22, 2022   Two next-door neighbors from very different backgrounds meet and become unlikely friends. Their reasons for ending up in their small village are very different from where they set out to be and their ending is as sad as their pasts.   You can tell from the get-go that Dorothy isn’t quite right in the head. She communes with her parents as if they are still alive and refuses to believe that her sister, Sylvia, has passed away. Not only can she not accept her death, she cannot accept Sylvia’s admission that their father sexually abused Sylvia.   For all of her bizarreness, Deborah manages to conduct several liaisons. After her husband, Brian, abandons her for another woman, Dorothy manages to have an affair with the married owner of her local bodega and with a ma...