Katherine Boo received the New York Public Library’s $15,000 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for her book Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. Boo announced at the awards ceremony that she will be donating the money to the community in Mumbai that was the subject of her book.
Click here for more info on the book and an opportunity to reserve it in our catalog.
Editor
The winner of the Best Novel catagory of the 2012 Nebula Awards, sponsored by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, is:
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Find in our catalog).
This is what it says in our catalog about the book: “The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity’s only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future. The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them”– Provided by publisher.
Editor
The Passage of Power by Robert Caro (Find in our catalog) has won the inaugural Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2012.
This is what it says about the book in our catalog: “Pulitizer Prize biographer Robert A. Caro follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career, describing Johnson’s volatile relationship with John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy during the fight they waged for the 1960 Democratic nomination for president, through Johnson’s unhappy vice presidency, his assumption to the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, his victories over the budget and civil rights, and the eroding trap of Vietnam.”
The award is voted on by members of Biographers International Organization from a list of nominees selected by a committee of members of the craft. The finalists were:
* A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman by Alice Kessler-Harris
* The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson
* The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
Editor
Howard Jacobson became the first two-time winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction when his novel Zoo Time took the award May 15, the Guardian reported, noting that the winner “as is traditional will be presented with a locally-bred Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after their winning title.” (Find Zoo Time in our catalog)
Jacobson, who had previously won in 2000 for Mighty Walzer, said, “This is the only literary prize that actively seeks out and rewards comedy. Other prizes often view it as sort of embarrassing writerly malfunction–which is treacherous, in my view, when you consider the comic origins of the novel and the strong comedic traditions of English writing in particular.”
This is what our catalog says about the book: “Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy’s peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them.
Not that anyone reads Guy anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn’t expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does.
In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it’s time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn’t. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book.
By turns angry, elegiac, and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love-love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best.”
Editor
Timothy Egan won the $7,500 Chautauqua Prize for his book Short nights of the Shadow Catcher: the epic life and immortal photographs of Edward Curtis (Find in our catalog). Presented annually by the Chautauqua Institution to a book of a book of fiction or literary/narrative nonfiction “that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts,” the award also includes all travel and expenses for a one-week residency at Chautauqua.
This is what it says about the book in our catalog: “Edward Curtis was dashing, charismatic, a passionate mountaineer, a famous photographer–the Annie Liebowitz of his time. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his great idea: He would try to capture on film the Native American nation before it disappeared. At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, Egan’s book tells the remarkable untold story behind Curtis’s iconic photographs, following him throughout Indian country from desert to rainforest as he struggled to document the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. Even with the backing of Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan, it took tremendous perseverance–six years alone to convince the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. The undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. He would die penniless and unknown in Hollywood just a few years after publishing the last of his twenty volumes. But the charming rogue with the grade-school education had fulfilled his promise–his great adventure succeeded in creating one of America’s most stunning cultural achievements.”– Provided by publisher.
Editor
Don DeLillo has been named the first recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, which honors “an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that–throughout long, consistently accomplished careers–have told us something about the American experience.” DeLillo will be presented with the new lifetime achievement award during the National Book Festival in September.
Here are some of DeLillo’s books in our catalog:
The Angel Esmeralda: nine stories [audiobook (CD)]
Editor
Winners of the Agatha Awards, which celebrate the “traditional mystery–books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie,” were honored at the Malice Domestic convention in Bethesda, Md., the weekend of May 4 and 5. This year’s fiction winners include:
Novel: The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny (Find in our catalog). “No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec, where two dozen cloistered monks live in peace and prayer. They grow vegetables, they tend chickens, they make chocolate. And they sing. Ironically, for a community that has taken a vow of silence, the monks have become world famous for their glorious voices, raised in ancient chants whose effect on both singer and listener is so profound it is known as “the beautiful mystery.” But when the renowned choir director is murdered, the lock on the monastery’s massive wooden door is drawn back to admit Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Surete du Quebec. There they discover disquiet beneath the silence, discord in the apparent harmony. One of the brothers, in this life of prayer and contemplation, has been contemplating murder. As the peace of the monastery crumbles, Gamache is forced to confront some of his own demons, as well as those roaming the remote corridors. Before finding the killer, before restoring peace, the Chief must first consider the divine, the human, and the cracks in between.”
Historical Novel: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for Murder by Catriona McPherson (Find in our catalog). “Dandy is caught between two feuding families who run rival department stores. Dandy’s services are needed when the heiress to one of the stores goes missing. As Dandy starts to unravel the long-hidden family secrets, she begins to discover disturbing connections and it’s not long before danger abounds.”–Dust jacket.
Editor
May is Mystery Month. The Mystery Writers of America held its annual Edgars Award banquet at the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan Thursday, May 2. The winners and nominees in all categories can be found at the MWA website.
Here are the crime novels:
Best Novel: Live by Night by Dennis Lehane. “In 1926, during the Prohibition, Joe Coughlin defies his strict law-and-order upbringing by climbing a ladder of organized crime that takes him from Boston to Cuba where he encounters a dangerous cast of characters who are all fighting for their piece of the American dream. By 1926, Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston Police captain, defies his proper upbringing and his father’s strict law-and-order orthodoxy. Graduating from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the riches, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw. But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns battle for control, no one can be trusted. For men like Joe one fate seems more likely than all others, an early death.”
Best First Novel: The Expats by Chris Pavone. “An international spy thriller about a former CIA agent who moves with her family to Luxembourg where everything is suspicious and nothing is as it seems”– Provided by publisher.
Best Paperback Original: The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters. “When the Earth is doomed by an imminent and unavoidable asteroid collision, New Hampshire homicide detective Hank Palace considers the worth of his job in a world destined to end in six months and investigates a suspicious suicide that nobody else cares about.”
Editor
The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced Friday, April 19 to launch the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Here are the books. Click on any title to go straight to our catalog
Biography: The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro
Current interest: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
Fiction: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
First fiction: Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead
History: America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas and the Compromise That Preserved the Union by Fergus M. Bordewich
Mystery/thriller: Broken Harbor by Tana French
Poetry: Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Gluck
Science and technology: Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams
Young adult literature: Ask the Passengers by A.S. King
Editor
Winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes in the letters categories were announced Monday, April 15. They are:
Fiction: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson (Find in our catalog)
Summary: “”The Orphan Masters Son” follows a young mans journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the worlds most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother–a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang–and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didnt know what starving people looked like.” Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, “The Orphan Masters Son” is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, “The Orphan Masters Son” ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of todays greatest writers.”
General nonfiction: Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King (Find in our catalog)
Summary: “Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in an explosive and deadly case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Floridas orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By days end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.” And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the “Florida Terror” at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight–not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshalls NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBIs unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”"
History: Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (Find in our catalog)
Summary: “The struggle for Vietnam occupies a central place in the history of the twentieth century. Fought over a period of three decades, the conflict drew in all the world’s powers and saw two of them–first France, then the United States–attempt to subdue the revolutionary Vietnamese forces. For France, the defeat marked the effective end of her colonial empire, while for America the war left a gaping wound in the body politic that remains open to this day. How did it happen? Tapping into newly accessible diplomatic archives in several nations and making full use of the published literature, distinguished scholar Fredrik Logevall traces the path that led two Western nations to lose their way in Vietnam. Embers of War opens in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference, where a young Ho Chi Minh tries to deliver a petition for Vietnamese independence to President Woodrow Wilson. It concludes in 1959, with a Viet Cong ambush on an outpost outside Saigon and the deaths of two American officers whose names would be the first to be carved into the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In between come years of political, military, and diplomatic maneuvering and miscalculation, as leaders on all sides embark on a series of stumbles that makes an eminently avoidable struggle a bloody and interminable reality. Logevall takes us inside the councils of war–and gives us a seat at the conference tables where peace talks founder. He brings to life the bloodiest battles of France’s final years in Indochina–and shows how from an early point, a succession of American leaders made disastrous policy choices that put America on its own collision course with history: Harry Truman’s fateful decision to reverse Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policy and acknowledge France’s right to return to Indochina after World War II; Dwight Eisenhower’s strenuous efforts to keep Paris in the fight and his escalation of U.S. involvement in the aftermath of the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu; and the curious turnaround in Senator John F. Kennedy’s thinking that would lead him as president to expand that commitment, despite his publicly stated misgivings about Western intervention in Southeast Asia. An epic story of wasted opportunities and tragic miscalculations, featuring an extraordinary cast of larger-than-life characters, Embers of War delves deep into the historical record to provide hard answers to the unanswered questions surrounding the demise of one Western power in Vietnam and the arrival of another. This book will become the definitive chronicle of the struggle’s origins for years to come.”
Biography: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss (Find in our catalog)
Summary: “Born to a black slave mother and a fugitive white French nobleman in present-day Haiti, Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but then made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy.”
Poetry: Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds (Find in our catalog)
Summary: “In this wise and intimate new book, Sharon Olds tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. As she carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending, Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip; the radical change in her sense of place in the world. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,” “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” Olds’s propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music–sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry she has yet given us.”
Editor
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