When author Rabih Alameddine accepted his National Book Award for Fiction on Wednesday night, he thanked his agent, his editor and early readers of his work. He also thanked his psychiatrist, his drug dealers and “all gastrointestinal doctors.”
“I guarantee you that I wouldn’t have been able to write a single word in the last 10 years without their help,” he said. “There would have been no movement.” Read more
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Percival Everett won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday for his novel “James,” a propulsive and slyly funny retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Huck’s companion, an enslaved man named James … The award for nonfiction was given to the anthropologist Jason De León for “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” an immersive account of the nearly seven years he spent embedded with human smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border. The book depicts traffickers as both victims and perpetrators of violence, often suffering from the same poverty as migrants. Read more
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Ned Blackhawk received the nonfiction award, with “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.” Read more
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Last night’s ceremony marked the first in-person National Book Awards since 2019 (ever since the pandemic, the festivities have gone virtual). It was a night of celebration, but concerns hung over the festivities—about the distressing state of the publishing industry, to be certain, but also about the wave of book bans sweeping the country. Read more
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Tiya Miles won the nonfiction prize for “All That She Carried.” The author Karen Tei Yamashita received a lifetime achievement award. Read more
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