Enjoy the finalists and winners of the National Book Awards for 2023, as voted by the National Book Foundation.
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"Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences" --
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Book
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FIC Adj
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"In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born. In “Due North,” an obedient daughter struggles to understand why she’s haunted by the spirit of her recently deceased father. In “Who’s Down?” a father, after a brief affair with vegetarianism, conspires with his daughter to order him a double cheeseburger. In “Candy for Hanif” a mother’s routine trip to the store for her disabled son takes an unlikely turn when she reflects on a near-death experience. In “Woman in Niqab,” a daughter’s suspicion of her father’s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. In “New Mexico,” a federal agent tasked with spying on a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam grapples with his responsibilities closer to home. With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human" --
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FIC Bil
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"In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland. During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community's fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination."--
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Book
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FIC Har
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The end of drum-time : a novel
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"In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native S?ami reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivv?ar, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse's daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses borders-of cultures, of beliefs, and of political divides-as Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea."--
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FIC Pyl
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"From the bestselling, acclaimed, beloved author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective"--
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Book
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New & Best List
The rediscovery of America : native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history
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The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. 04/18 j
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Book
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973.0497 Bla
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Liliana's invincible summer : a sister's search for justice
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In July, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice. This book tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously romantic young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome--but insecure and possessive--older man, through the weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.--
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Book
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362.88 Riv
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Told through a series of 248 notes, this volume explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake of it, touching upon such themes as language, beauty, memory, history and literature.
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Book
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305.896 Sha
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We could have been friends, my father and I : a Palestinian memoir
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A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights. Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of author and activist Raja. Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably. This is the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, and a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.--
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Book
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956.94 She
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Fire weather : a true story from a hotter world
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"In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America's most devastating forest fires--and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes"--
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Book
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363.379 Vai
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"A stunning debut that "brims with the talent and generosity of a living classic" (Ilya Kaminsky), from an award-winning DeafBlind poet. Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the braille slate to sensuous prose poems to pathbreaking translations from ASL and Protactile, a language built on touch. Amid the astonishing task of constructing a new canon, Clark reveals a radically commonplace life-the vagaries of family, grief, and small delights: visiting a museum, knitting, and, once, encountering a ghost in a gas station. A rare work of transformation and necessary discovery, How to Communicate offers a "steadily revelatory gift" (Carl Phillips)"--
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From unincorporated territory [åmot]
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"This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Gu?ahan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "?Amot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," and commonly refers to medicinal plants. Traditional healers were known as yo'?amte, and they gathered ?amot in the jungle, and recited chants and invocations of taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of ?amot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders"--
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"Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream-and work-toward a more capacious 'we'. In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a morecapacious 'we.' How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poemsdraw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. perched i am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world. under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen. if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside me, a love of beauty riseslike sap, sprouts from my scalpand stretches forth. i send out my song, an ariablue and feathered, and grow toward it,choirs bare, but soon to bud. i amblack and becoming. -after Alison Saar's Blue Bird"--
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A collection of poems reflects the experiences of Asian Americans and the problem of creating an Asian American identity while influenced by Westerners' ideas about Asians.
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The stories in this collection are wildly unique and imaginative, by turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning, where monstrous creatures take the shapes of furry woodland creatures and danger lurks in unexpected corners of everyday apartment buildings. But Chung's rare, haunting universe could be our own, illuminating the ills of contemporary society.
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Audiobook
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FIC Chu
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"A historical novel about a French botanist's search for a mysterious woman who escaped from slavery in Senegal"--
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Book
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FIC Dio
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Praised for acting like a big girl when she is small, as a young girl grows, "big" becomes a word of criticism, until the girl realizes that she is fine just the way she is.
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Book
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E Har
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In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, thirteen-year-old Matthew discovers a shocking secret about his great-grandmother's past as he learns about her life during the Holodomor famine in Soviet Ukraine.
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Book
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J FIC Mar
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A first time for everything : a true story
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"Dan's always been a good kid. The kind of kid who listens to his teachers, helps his mom with grocery shopping, and stays out of trouble. But being a good kid doesn't stop him from being bullied and feeling like he's invisible, which is why Dan has low expectations when his parents send him on a class trip to Europe. At first, he's right. He's stuck with the same girls from his middle school who love to make fun of him, and he doesn't know why his teacher insisted he come on this trip. But as he travels through France, Germany, Switzerland, and England, a series of first experiences begin to change him--first Fanta, first fondue, first time stealing a bike from German punk rockers... and first love."--
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Book
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J FIC San