The Free For All is delighted to congratulate the winners of the 67th annual National Book Award!  See below for the titles, and click on the “About the book” links to see interviews and footage from the awards ceremony, courtesy of the National Book Foundation!

Fiction: The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

About the book: Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Non-Fiction:  Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi

About the book: Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society,that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America–more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Ibram X. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.

Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation’s racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them–and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

Poetry: The Performance of Becoming Human, Daniel Borzutzky

About the book:  Following in the path of his acclaimed collections The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011) and In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), Daniel Borzutzky returns to confront the various ways nation-states and their bureaucracies absorb and destroy communities and economies. In The Performance of Becoming Human, the bay of Valparaiso merges into the western shore of Lake Michigan, where Borzutzky continues his poetic investigation into the political and economic violence shared by Chicago and Chile, two places integral to his personal formation. To become human is to navigate borders, including the fuzzy borders of institutions, the economies of privatization, overdevelopment, and underdevelopment, under which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses in cities, villages, deserts. Borzutzky, whose writing Eileen Myles has described as “violent, perverse, and tender” in its portrayal of a “kaleidoscopic journey of American horror and global horror,” adds another chapter to a growing and important compendium of work that asks what it means to a be both a unitedstatesian and a globalized subject whose body is “shared between the earth, the state, and the bank.”

Young People’s Literature: March, Book Three, Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell

About the book: By the fall of 1963, the Civil Rights Movement has penetrated deep into the American consciousness, and as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis is guiding the tip of the spear. Through relentless direct action, SNCC continues to force the nation to confront its own blatant injustice, but for every step forward, the danger grows more intense: Jim Crow strikes back through legal tricks, intimidation, violence, and death. The only hope for lasting change is to give voice to the millions of Americans silenced by voter suppression: “One Man, One Vote.”

To carry out their nonviolent revolution, Lewis and an army of young activists launch a series of innovative campaigns, including the Freedom Vote, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and an all-out battle for the soul of the Democratic Party waged live on national television.

With these new struggles come new allies, new opponents, and an unpredictable new president who might be both at once. But fractures within the movement are deepening … even as 25-year-old John Lewis prepares to risk everything in a historic showdown high above the Alabama river, in a town called Selma.

On Tuesday, at 4:50pm Eastern Standard Time, Paul Beatty, a California-born author, became the first American to win the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout.  

In awarding the most prestigious award for fiction in the UK, the judges of the Man Booker chose a very specifically American novel.  Beatty himself has made a career for himself by observing the beauty and horror of American life, and capturing it in his stories in a manner that is both deeply troubling and shockingly funny–and The Sellout is no exception.  The book itself opens as our narrator, Bonbon, stands in front of the Supreme Court.  A black man from a forgotten town near Los Angeles, Bonbon grew up with his father, a controversial sociologist, who used Bonbon as a subject in his racially-charged psychological studies.  Bonbon has spent his life believing that his father’s long-promised memoir will justify all their struggles–but when his father is killed in a drive-by shooting, it is revealed that there is, and never was, a memoir.  Lost, in despair, and determined to right what wrongs he can, Bonbon decides to find a way to put his tiny town on the map.  The way he does this?  By attempting to reinstate slavery and to segregate the local high school–the act that ultimately lands him in front of the Supreme Court.

A man who has built his career on challenging stereotypes, and questioning our inability to overcome the effects of history, The Sellout is Beatty’s fourth novel.  His debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle, about a black surfer in Los Angeles, came out in 1996.  He published two more novels, Tuff in 2000, and Slumberland in 2008, and edited an anthology of African-American comic writing.  The Sellout met with rave reviews when it was released; the Wall Street Journal called it ““Swiftian satire of the highest order. Like someone shouting fire in a crowded theatre, Mr Beatty has whispered ‘Racism’ in a postracial world”.  But it didn’t cause an enormous stir, perhaps, as The Guardian points out, because it is so different from the standard fare, and it’s humor is so risky.  And even though the book won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, it still has flown under a lot of readers’ radars–until now, of course.

Amanda Foreman, the Chair of the Judges’ Panel, said that Beatty’s victory was a unanimous decision, in part because of his willingness to write a book that challenges so many, and on so many levels.  In her speech during the award ceremony, she noted, “It plunges into the heart of contemporary American society with absolutely savage wit of the kind I haven’t seen since Swift or Twain…It manages to eviscerate every social nuance, every sacred cow, while making us laugh and also making us wince … It is really a novel for our times.”  As to the language (and delicate subject matter) in the book, Foreman noted “Paul Beatty has said being offended is not an emotion. That’s his answer to the reader”, emphasizing the critical role of satire to comment on modern-day issues.

The win is also a coup for Oneworld, Beatty’s publisher, who also published last year’s Man Booker Prize winner, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings.

If you’d like to hear Beatty’s talk after his award about race and America and stories, check out the video below–and be sure to check out The Sellout soon!

http://youtu.be/U6ycBUNBFnU

BREAKING 2016 #NobelPrize in Literature to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” pic.twitter.com/XYkeJKRfhv

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 13, 2016

Bob Dylan becomes the 108th Nobel Prize Winner in Literature!

You can watch the announcement here live:

(The announcement itself is in Swedish, but the crowd’s reaction at around :50 is rather priceless)

This is actually a pretty radical decision for the Nobel Prize people—the award has, rather famously, not gone to American authors, traditionally speaking (the last American to win was Toni Morrison in 1993), and  Bob Dylan is not strictly a novelist, or a poet, or a short-story writer, which are typically the kind of writers that the Nobel favors.  Instead, they recognized his radical additions to American song-writing and poetry, comparing Dylan to Homer or Sappho, whose works were composed to be performed orally.  In giving the award to Dylan, whose birth name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, the Nobel also seems to be attempting to bridge a theoretically and cultural gap between “high literature” and “commercial literature”; in other words, they want this award to mean something to everyone, a goal in which they certainly succeeded by choosing a man whose music has meant so much to so many for the past forty years.  As the Academy noted: “Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured persistently, an undertaking called the ‘Never-Ending Tour.’ Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature.”

Mr. Dylan’s other awards include Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe awards, as well as an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

When asked to recommend a work to introduce new listeners to Bob Dylan’s work, Sara Danius, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary and a professor in literature at Stockholm University, recommended his 1966 album “Blonde on Blonde,” saying it contained “many examples of his brilliant way of rhyming and putting together refrains and his pictorial thinking.”

We couldn’t agree more, but feel free to come into the Library and check out some other selections from America’s newest Nobel Prize Winner!

Prof Seamus Perry of @engfac on Bob Dylan winning @NobelPrize for Literature pic.twitter.com/khaoIZuLd2

— University of Oxford (@UniofOxford) October 13, 2016

I happily admit to having a special soft spot in my heart for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, but that shouldn’t detract from the other book awards out there–particularly because they offer so many great reading recommendations to us hungry readers looking for something new to try!

As we discussed last year, the National Book Awards have (and continue to have) some identity issues.  They were originally imagined to be some kind of rival to the Academy Awards, before making the realization that, and I quote, “Book people are really not actors”.  And while the award committee are very much trying to reinvent the award into something to rival the Man Booker in terms of prestige and gravitas, there is still a fairly high reliance on celebrity and flashy parties, rather than on the books.

We, at the Free For All, however, are always All About the Books, so let’s focus on the best part of the National Book Awards, and get to the long-lists for Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature, which was announced last Friday.  A reminder: the National Book Award is only for books written in English and published by American publishers, so this list usually looks much different to other fiction award lists.  The short list will be announced on October 13,  and the Winners will be announced on November 16:

FICTION:

• Chris Bachelder: The Throwback Special 
• Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You 
• Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
• Paulette Jiles, News of the World
• Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs
• Elizabeth McKenzie, The Portable Veblen (Also a Finalist for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction!)
• Lydia Millet, Sweet Lamb of Heaven
• Brad Watson, Miss Jane
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn 

NON-FICTION:

• Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
• Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
• Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
• Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  
• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
  
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
  
• Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
• Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America 
• Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition
• Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

POETRY:

• Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human
• Rita Dove, Collected Poems 1974 – 2004 
• Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics
• Donald Hall, The Selected Poems of Donald Hall 
• Jay Hopler, The Abridged History of Rainfall
• Donika Kelly, Bestiary
• Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade
• Solmaz Sharif, Look
• Monica Youn, Blackacre
• Kevin Young, Blue Laws 

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE:

• Kwame Alexander, Booked
• Kate DiCamillo, Raymie Nightingale 
• John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (Artist), March: Book Three 
• Grace Lin, When the Sea Turned to Silver
• Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours 
• Meg Medina, Burn Baby Burn 
• Sara Pennypacker & Jon Klassen (Illustrator), Pax
• Jason Reynolds, Ghost
• Caren Stelson, Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story 
• Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star