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...

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2022, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2022, Dublin Finalist 2023, Goodreads Finalist 2021, National Book Finalist 2021   Date Read: February 20, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ An ancient Greek manuscript connects humanity's past, present, and future. “ Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you ” wrote Antonius Diogenes at the end of the first century C.E.—and millennia later, Pulitzer Prize winner Doerr is his fitting heir. Around Diogenes' manuscript, "Cloud Cuckoo Land"—the author did exist, but the text is invented—Doerr builds a community of readers and nature lovers that transcends the boundaries of time and space. The protagonist of the original story is Aethon, a shepherd whose dream of escaping to a paradise in the sky leads to a wild series of adventures in the bodies of beast, fish, and fowl. Aethon's story is first found by Anna in 15th-century Constantinople; thou...

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1968   Nomination: National Book Finalist 1968   Date Read: February 13, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Few first novels promised so much for a new writer as Styron's Faulknerian Lie Down in Darkness; with only one flawed major book in between, now sixteen years later it is difficult to relate this to the early book except for the emotional charge of some of the writing, most effective when descriptive. In the fulminating first person of Nat Turner, Just before he is to be killed, this reviews at black heat the "ruction" he incited—a mass murder and rape in the Virginia of 1831. "Nigger preacher," self-designated prophet, Nat is primarily a man who for the last half of his thirty-one years has nursed a "pure and obdurate" hatred for white men (and a less pure desire for their women). In the language of the law he's just an "animate chattel" although he had acquired th...

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JEAN STAFFORD by Jean Stafford   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1970   Nominations: National Book Finalist 1970, NY Times Finalist 1969   Date Read: January 26, 2025   MAGGIE MERIWETHER’S RICH EXPERIENCE Maggie Meriwether is on her first trip abroad from Tennessee. She’s alone and her ability to speak French has abandoned her. At a birthday party, at which she was promised everyone would speak English but did not, she finds herself the odd woman out from the other sophisticates present. She encounters wonders she’s never seen such as clothing, food, men walking a tightrope over a swimming pool, a tree house with a nargileh inside. After crying on her way home, she realizes that the experience, when recounted to her friends, actually makes her sound sophisticated and world-wise.   THE CHILDREN’S GAME At a casino in Belgium, the widow Abby is questioning her life abroad. She moved to Europe upon the death of her husband but now finds herself missi...

THE TIGER’S WIFE by Tea Obreht   Award: Women’s Prize Winner 2011   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2012, Dublin Longlist 2013, National Book Finalist 2011, NY Times Finalist 2011   Date Read: August 25, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Young physician navigating postwar chaos in the Balkans tries to make sense of the mysterious death of her beloved grandfather.   En route to a rural orphanage with plans on inoculating a group of motherless local kids, 28-year-old Natalia gets the sudden, sad news that her grandfather, a well-respected doctor, has passed away. That he died far from home, in a village that appears on no map, raises several questions, in spite of the fact that the old man had been suffering from cancer. Natalia takes it upon herself to investigate the clinic he was last seen in, and collect his affects, while trying to fulfill her medical obligations to the orphans. A clear-eyed realist who came of age during the bloody dissolution of the former Yugosl...

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...

LILA by Marilynne Robinson   Award: National Book Critics Circle Winner 2014   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2015, Carnegie Longlist 2015, Dublin Finalist 2016, National Book Finalist 2014, Oprah Book Club 2021   Date Read: May 27, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “ More balm in Gilead as Robinson ( When I Was a Child I Read Books , 2012, etc.) returns to familiar ground to continue the saga of John Ames and his neighbors. Ames, Robinson’s readers will know, is a minister in the hamlet of Gilead, a quiet place in a quiet corner of a quiet Midwestern state. Deceptively quiet, we should say, for Robinson, ever the Calvinist (albeit a gentle and compassionate one), is a master at plumbing the roiling depths below calm surfaces. In this installment, she turns to the title character, Ames’ wife, who has figured mostly just in passing in  Gilead  (2004) and  Home  (2008). How, after all, did this young outsider wind up in a place so far away from the orbits o...

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...

PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2001, LA Times Finalist 1999, National Book Finalist 1999   Date Read: December 3, 2023   From Kirkus Reviews: “A stirring meditation on the true nature and necessity of the family. Among the several damaged families in this beautifully cadenced and understated tale is that of Tom Guthrie, a high-school history teacher in small Holt, Colorado, who’s left to raise his two young sons, Ike and Bobby, alone when his troubled wife first withdraws from them and then, without explanation, abandons them altogether. Victoria Roubideaux, a high-school senior, is thrown out of her house when her mother discovers she’s pregnant. Harold and Raymond McPheron, two aging but self-reliant cattle ranchers, are haunted by their imaginings of what they may have missed in life by electing never to get married, never to strike out on their own. Haruf (Where You Once Belonged, 1989, etc.) believably draws these various incomplete or trouble...

CHAIN GANG ALL STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah   Award:  Inside Literary Prize Winner 2025   Nominations: Aspen Words Finalist 2024, Carnegie Longlist 2024, Center For Fiction Longlist 2023, Dublin longlist 2024, National Book Finalist 2023, NY Times Finalist 2023   Date Read: October 27, 2023   As much as I don’t like the dystopian future genre, this book might be favorite book of 2023. The dystopian future isn’t that far in the future and it portrays something I could actually believe might happen – turning convicts into gladiators who kill each other. A chain gang is like a team and links in the chain are players.    So richly imagined and full of awful facts about the atrocity that is mass incarceration in America, Adjei-Brenyah has created a work that is so unique, so fresh and so very necessary. We can all agree that murder and rape are atrocious. And of course there are people who need a time out or a permanent time out but does that mean soci...

TRICK by Domenico Starnone   Nominations: National Book Finalist 2018, PEN/Translation Finalist 2019   Date Read: August 29, 2023   This beautiful novel is loosely paralleled to “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James as the Grandfather in this story also travels to his childhood home and begins to wonder what other paths his life could have taken. Currently living in Milan and tasked with illustrating this work by James, the Grandfather reluctantly agrees to return to Naples, his hometown, to watch his 4 year old grandson. His daughter and son-in-law need to attend a conference and, in his own words, get down to the business of serious fighting.   Grandfather, however, is ill-matched with Mario, his know-it-all grandson. Having completely forgotten what childhood entails, Grandfather is pestered every second of the day to play, draw, pretend, attend to physical needs, carry him, retrieve toys and, for a brief period, be locked out of the house and completely at the mercy ...

MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli   Nominations: Booker Longlist 2021, National Book Finalist 2020   Date Read: May 8, 2023   I cannot imagine living in a country where violence and war were an everyday part of life. Where the legacy of my country was one of violence. I can’t imagine not being able to travel to certain areas because of my ethnicity. I cannot imagine having land stolen from me or becoming accustomed to the sight of armed military. Yet, this is exactly what the narrator of Minor Detail experiences on the daily.   This novella opens with the final patrols of Israelis searching for hideouts from the waning war between Israel and Palestine. Israeli soldiers happen upon a Bedouin settlement and kill all the soldiers, but taking one teenage Palestinian girl captive. While the captain initially tries to keep her safe, he finally ends up raping her and tossing him to the other soldiers for their amusement. She is ultimately used for as long as possible and then k...

FIELDWORK by Mischa Berlinski   Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2007, Dublin Longlist 2009, National Book Finalist 2007   Date Read: March 27, 2023   A journalist, Mischa, moves to Thailand with his girlfriend, Rachel, and through a friend of his, hears about a white woman (farang) who is serving 50 years in a Thai jail for murder. Martiya had murdered a farang missionary and only a few weeks prior had committed suicide by eating too much opium. Mischa was instantly enthralled by the story.   Although Mischa is cobbling together income through freelance journalism, he begins to research Martiya’s story and the deeper he digs, the more captivating the story. Why did she kill a missionary? After Martiya completed the anthropologic fieldwork, in which she was studying the Dyalo, a remote tribe in Thailand, why did she return to Thailand after a brief stay back in Berkeley? How did she even meet David, the missionary she killed? Mischa was consumed by these ques...

DROP CITY by T.C. Boyle   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2005, National Book Finalist 2003, NY Times Finalist 2003   Date Read: March 7, 2023   Boyle imagines what would happen when the 60’s counter-culture encounters the basic need for survival and puts to the test the ideals a hippie commune profess to believe. Having worn out their welcome in California’s Russian River, Drop City, as their commune comes to be known, need to find a new place to entrench without the limitations of zoning laws and regulations.   The group’s nominal leader, Norm, has an uncle that abandoned a cabin in Alaska’s bush, one of the most remote places on earth. Loading up about 30 people, dogs, goats and children, they caravan up to Thirtymile and the reality of their new life slowly, bit by bit, begins to dawn on them. They now have to confront shirkers who don’t help. They now have to work tirelessly to establish a food cache and shelter before the 60 below winter sets in. In a flash, gone ...