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Oregon Book Awards 2020 Finalists
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No God Like the Mother
by Kesha Ajọsẹ Fisher
Kesha Ajọsẹ Fisher's No God like the Mother follows characters in transition, through tribulation and hope. Set around the world--the bustling streets of Lagos, the arid gardens beside the Red Sea, an apartment in Paris, the rain-washed suburbs of the Pacific Northwest--this collection of nine stories is a masterful exploration of life's uncertainty that will draw readers in and keep them riveted.
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Black light : stories
by Kimberly King Parsons
A lyrical debut story collection illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood by steadfast dreamers trapped by circumstance in Texas.
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The night swimmers
by Peter Rock
Twenty years after a young widow's disappearance, a man who went for mysterious but cathartic night swims with her on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin in the 1990s revisits his memories of that summer and uncovers clues to her fate.
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The dreamers : a novel
by Karen Thompson Walker
The best-selling author of The Age of Miracles presents the story of a student at an isolated Southern California college town who witnesses a strange sleeping illness that subjects patients to life-altering, heightened dreams.
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The White Death : An Illusion
by Gabriel Urza
The illusionist Benjamin Vaughn is fourteen years old when he dies under mysterious circumstances at the height of his short career. In the wake of his death, the life of this brilliant yet reclusive prodigy known as "The Great Bendini" is meticulously chronicled by an unnamed narrator who encountered Vaughn when he himself was a boy.
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General Nonfiction finalists
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Pansies
by Carol Barrett
Pansies, Carol Barrett's collection of thirty slight, delicate vignettes, recounts her experience of the Apostolic Lutheran community through the lens of the young, Apostolic woman, Abigail, who babysits for her daughter. Each brief yet intimate piece housed within this collection renders the indelible bond formed between Abigail and the narrator's daughter with grace and wonder.
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Fables and futures : biotechnology, disability, and the stories we tell ourselves
by George Estreich
From next-generation prenatal tests, to virtual children, new biotechnologies grant us unprecedented power to predict and shape future people. That power implies a question about belonging: which people, which variations, will we welcome? This book explores the troubled territory where biotechnology and disability meet.
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Horizon
by Barry Holstun Lopez
Recounts the author's travels to six regions of the world and the extraordinary encounters with people, animals, and natural elements that shaped his life.
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Voices from Bears Ears : seeking common ground on sacred land
by Rebecca Robinson
Presents personal stories and interviews with activists and private individuals who are working to protect Bears Ears National Monument, a land of unsurpassed natural beauty and deep historical significance, from threatening environmental policy.
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Creative Nonfiction finalists
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Anxious attachments
by Beth Alvarado
These stunning, intimate essays take us through the life stages of a woman living in the American Southwest from the 1970s to the present. As she moves from adolescence into adulthood, the narrator grapples with attachments that develop through her family and her ties to the wider world around her while she works as a teacher, writer, and caregiver.
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I am a stranger here myself
by Debra Gwartney
Part history, part memoir, Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of fourteen people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by Cayuse Indians. Whitman's role as a white woman drawn in to "settle" the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney's own family.
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The Oasis This Time : Living and Dying With Water in the West
by Rebecca Lawton
Water, the most critical fluid on the planet, is seen as savior, benefactor, and Holy Grail in these fifteen essays on natural and faux oases. Fluvial geologist and former Colorado River guide Rebecca Lawton follows species both human and wild to their watery roots.
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Volcanoes, Palm Trees & Privilege : Essays on Hawai'i
by Liz Prato
Prato explores what it means to be a white tourist in a seemingly paradisiacal land that has been formed, and largely destroyed, by white outsiders. Hawaiian history, pop culture, and contemporary affairs are woven with personal narrative in fifteen essays that examine how the touristic ideal of Hawai'i came to be, and what it "is," at its core.
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These are strange times, my dear : field notes from the republic
by Wendy Willis
In these pointed and wide-ranging essays, Willis explores everything from personal resistance to the rise of political podcasts, civic loneliness to the exploitation of personal data, public outrage to the opioid crisis―all with a poet's gift for finding the sacred in the mundane, a hope in the dark.
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Birches
by Carl Adamshick
Brutal and tender, Adamshick's spare poems recount a son's unsentimental and powerful love for his mother, while contemplating, in the wake of her death, what it is to be truly alive.
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Secure Your Own Mask
by Shaindel Beers
These poems balance between the harrowing and the beautiful, hovering at the precipice where women are both horseback riding heroines and battered mothers striving to protect their homes, their children, their identities. These poems are knives thrown with precision, fairytales rendered real through the grit and dirt of the natural world surrounding their imperfect speakers.
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Real Daughter
by Lynn Otto
In these bracing meditations on matriarchal inheritance and the nature of the real, Lynn Otto breaks open pervasive, inherited silences, the 'prickered vines' that 'hold one so still.' By putting into motion various methods of perception, Otto transforms habitual stillness into 'survivable distance.'
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This Luminous : New and Selected Poems
by Allan Peterson
From the vast complexities of a world in which synesthesia is our natural translator, the author's poems convey the consistent message that the ordinary isn't. Selected from books and chapbooks covering almost thirty years of writing, the author's work draws heavily from landscapes like the Gulf Coast, the sciences, history, and the author's background in visual arts.
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Spectra
by Ashley Toliver
In her radiant debut, Toliver carefully explores domesticity, medical trauma, and the profound limitations of having a body. Testing the bounds of relationships and identity, Toliver displays her linguistic gifts in poems that resist egotism and startle with their intimacy.
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