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Book Award Winners December 2018
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National Book AwardRing in the new year reading one of these National Book Award winning novels.The award recognizes the best in American literature. The prize has been awarded every year since 1950. The current categories are Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translation, and Young People's Literature.
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The Friend by Sigrid NunezBecoming the guardian of her late best friend's enormous Great Dane, a grieving woman is evicted from her no-pets apartment and forges a deep bond with the equally distraught animal in ways that initially disturb her friends. By the award-winning author of Salvation City. Fiction Winner
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The New Negro : the Life of Alain Lockeby Jeffrey C. StewartA biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance describes him becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD at Harvard University and promoting the work of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jacob Lawrence. Nonfiction Winner
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Indecency by Justin Phillip ReedIndecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us. Poetry Winner
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The Emissaryby Yko TawadaIn Japan, which has cut itself off from the world after suffering a massive irreparable disaster, Yoshiro cares for his grandson, Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy and ancient soul whom he believes is a beacon of hope for the world in this time of darkness. Translation Winner
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The Poet X by Elizabeth AcevedoThe daughter of devout immigrants discovers the power of slam poetry and begins participating in a school club as part of her effort to understand her mother's strict religious beliefs and her own developing relationship to the world. Young People's Literature
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The Man with the Golden Armby Nelson AlgrenThe story of gambler Frankie Machine as he struggles to stay alive amid the corruption and drug addiction of Chicago's slums and underworld. 1950 Fiction Winner
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The Light Around the Body by Robert BlyAward-winning poetry focuses on politics, the Vietnam War, and the events in the America of the late 60's. 1968 Poetry Winner
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The Great War and Modern Memoryby Paul FussellThis brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who--with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning--most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes--in every area, including language itself--brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War. For generations of readers, this work has represented and embodied a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail. 1976 Arts and Letters Winner
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard RhodesTraces the development of the atomic bomb from Leo Szilard's concept through the drama of the race to build a workable device to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. 1987 Nonfiction Winner
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Sabbath's Theaterby Philip RothThe death of his long-time mistress takes Mickey Sabbath, an aging and audacious libertine and onetime puppeteer, on a psychic journey that leads him to an evocative confrontation with his past. 1995 Fiction Winner
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Homeless Bird by Gloria WhelanDiscovering that her arranged husband-to-be is too young and desperately ill, thirteen-year-old Koly knows that her life will never be the same after she is married and so must find a way to make things better for herself despite the difficulties she must endure due to family traditions in her native India. 2000 Young People's Literature Winner
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Forsyth County Public Library 660 West Fifth Street Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27101 336-703-2665www.forsythlibrary.org |
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