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Oregon Book Awards 2019 Finalists
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French exit : a tragedy of manners
by Patrick deWitt
Bankrupted by her infamous litigator husband's tabloid death, a scandal-fearing widow flees New York for Paris, where her deadbeat son and she navigate near-comic self-destructive choices. By the New York Times best-selling author of The Sisters Brothers.
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The Verdun affair : a novel
by Nick Dybek
A sweeping, romantic, and profoundly moving novel, set in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and Los Angeles in the 1950s, about a lonely young man, a beautiful widow, and the amnesiac soldier whose puzzling case binds them together even as it tears them apart.
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Whiskey when we're dry
by John Larison
Facing starvation and worse when she is orphaned on her family's 1885 homestead, a 17-year-old sharpshooter cuts off her hair and disguises herself as a boy to journey across the mountains in search of her outlaw brother.
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The maw : a novel
by Taylor Zajonc
Milo Luttrell never expected to step inside the mouth of an ancient cave in rural Tanzania. After all, he's a historian--not an archaeologist. But when a storm hits the surface base camp, stranding the cavers and washing away supplies, all communication to the outside world is lost. As the remaining resources dwindle and members of the team begin to exhibit strange and terrifying abilities, Milo must brave the encroaching darkness to unearth the truth.
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Red clocks : a novel
by Leni Zumas
Five women—including a high school teacher, a biographer, a frustrated mom, a pregnant adopted teen and a forest-dwelling homeopath—struggle with changes in a near-future America where abortion and assisted fertility have been outlawed and where the homeopath is targeted by a modern-day witch hunt. By the author of The Listeners.
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General Nonfiction finalists
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In defense of Wyam : native-white alliances & the struggle for Celilo Village
by Katrine Barber
Having secured access to hundreds of previously unknown and unexamined letters, Katrine Barber revisits the subject of Death of Celilo Falls, her first book. She presents a remarkable alliance across the opposed Native and settler-descended groups, chronicling how the lives of two women leaders converged in a shared struggle to protect the Indian homes of Celilo Village.
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Dangerous subjects : James D. Saules and the rise of black exclusion in Oregon
by Kenneth R. Coleman
Citing his book as more microhistory than biography, independent historian, writer, and musician Coleman details the amazing story of one James D. Saules (prob. 1806-1849), a black mariner, who came to Oregon as a single man at the peak of the fur trade. Adapting to life in the Oregon Territory, he took a Chinook wife and began a business in boat service. Later he moved to the Willamette Valley at the same time that hundreds of Anglo-American immigrants arrived in the region, who would lay the groundwork for the United States to eventually claim and redistribute nearly 300,000 square miles of Oregon land, thereby overwhelming a region that once boasted a surprising degree of social and cultural fluidity.
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Power in the telling : Grand Ronde, Warm Springs, and intertribal relations in the casino era
by Brook Colley
This case study of the role of the media and federal policies in intertribal casino disputes delves into the efforts of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to build a casino in Cascade Locks, Oregon, in the 21st century, and resistance to those effort from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who didn’t want the competition against their own casino.
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Birding without borders : an obsession, a quest, and the biggest year in the world
by Noah K Strycker
In 2015, Noah Strycker, a young American birder, became the first person to see more than half of the 10,000 bird species on planet Earth in one year. Traveling to forty-one countries on seven continents with just a small backpack, a pair of binoculars, and a series of one-way tickets, Noah not only set a new world record, he also captured the hearts and imaginations of people all over the world.
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Creative Nonfiction finalists
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Incalculable Loss
by manuel arturo abreu
The debut collection of critical prose from artist and poet manuel arturo abreu. In their own words, the text “orbits the topics of art, race, tech, and feelings,” gathering writing from 2014 to 2018 and presenting a kind of paean to the critical position, which is often maligned as parasitic or paradoxical. With a sense of casual rigor and flippancy, the included texts tackle themes from the problems of theorizing cannibalism, the violence of modernism in art via theft of Black and brown aesthetics, the commodification of identity, and the ways in which Big Data makes all of “us” newly complicit in the death and violence that powers the global system. Originally titled Against Theory — as in both anti-theory and rubbing up on its surface — abreu’s text offers various modes of recalibrating one’s own thinking, showing that if one truly loves knowledge, one must let it go.
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The education of a young poet
by David Biespiel
The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel’s moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse—a great-grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa—through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the "pattern and random bursts that make up a life.
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The gospel of trees : a memoir
by Apricot Anderson Irving
The author shares her memories of growing up in Haiti as the daughter of an idealistic missionary, exploring her experiences living in a hospital compound as her family and the country experienced a period of upheaval.
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Homing instincts
by Dionisia Morales
As a native New Yorker who now calls Oregon home, Dionisia Morales knows how moving and resettling can spark an identity crisis relative to geography, family, and tradition. The essays collected in Homing Instincts explore how Morales's conception of home plays out in her daily life, as she navigates the gap between where she is and the stories she tells herself about where she belongs.
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Until We Are Level Again
by José Angel Araguz
In his third collection, José Angel Araguz's poems grope the walls of a dark room, looking for answers from a father who has been absent. The writing amplifies the ache of empty spaces, and delves into themes of culture, home, growth, reflections, and change.
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Small Gods
by Matthew Minicucci
Matthew Minicucci’s new book is a balm for our time. In a quiet voice, he counsels, “Wait, and watch…” Devoid of rhetoric, easy outrage, and exhortation, Minicucci advocates, instead, for the transformative power of close-up scrutiny – poetry’s timeless way of looking that encourages the nuanced narratives of “small gods” living in the margins and crevices of everyday life to rise into view.
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Dirt Eaters
by Eliza Rotterman
A lush, fierce, primal work in which the broken world still rotates and orbits--not for us as we could project, not as a metaphor for redemption--but we get to ride on it anyway. Eliza Rotterman has a voice unlike any other and familiar too: she writes, in finely faceted jewels of language set in strong lines that cut as they connect, of a woman in her body / a woman on this planet ever-aware, observing everything, suffering, believing, tracking, clocking, ticking, as she must.
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A Long Late Pledge
by Wendy Willis
Willis's second book of poems arrives at the perfect moment in our national conversation about democracy, what it is and where it has failed. Willis's book suggests what remedies there might be for resurrecting its original premise, this time including a pledge to honor what was left out of its charters and laws the first time around. Grounded primarily in the landscape of Willis's home state of Oregon, the book contains a number of poems that find their footing farther east as well, as far as Monticello and beyond.
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Ladder to the Light
by Beth Wood
Inspired by an image from a Jane Hirshfield poem ‘Mule Heart’ in which grief and joy are carried in “two waiting baskets,” Wood seeks to find balance again and regain footing after heartbreaking loss. Ladder to the Light chronicles her journey from grief to gratitude to believing in love again—poetry as a ladder that lifts us back up to the light.
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For finalists in Young Adult, Children's, and Graphic Literature categories visit the Literary Arts website.
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