The National Book Critics Circle honors excellence in literature and focuses its work on elevating the conversation about books, reading, and criticism nationwide. The group formed in 1974 at New York’s legendary Algonquin Hotel. There are currently 600 members who are editors or literary critics.

Every year, the group honors the best of the prior year’s books published in English with the National Book Critics Circle Award in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism. The 2024 awards were given this year on March 21.

This year’s winners in each category are:

Fiction: I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore Nonfiction: We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian Biography: Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage  by Jonny SteinbergAutobiography: How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair Poetry: Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee ChoiCriticism: Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression by Tina Post 

Additional awards were handed out by the group as well. They included:

The John Leonard Prize for best debut: Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. FreemanThe Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Judy BlumeThe Toni Morrison Achievement Award: The American Library Association The Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, which honors both the book’s author and translator: Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü and translated by Maureen Freely.

You can learn more about the National Book Critics Circle at their website and discover the previous award winners.

Misconceptions about book bans are legion. When they’re perpetrated by folks who are against book banning, the truth is, those myths emerge not out of evil or desire to misinform. Instead, they come because this moment in book bans is unlike any other in American history. They also come because the average person—be they a book lover, a library worker, an educator, or simply someone who cares about democracy—is not steeped in this news day in and day out and, thus, does not see the whole of the picture. It’s not bad information. It’s a lack of information.

Let’s talk about a small number of misconceptions and why it is important to get these facts correct.

Book bans make kids/teens hurry to read the books being banned

This is not true, and it’s a statement that is shared with all of the love, thought, and care in the world—it’s also perpetrated by some of the biggest names in the book world who think they’re doing a favor by repeating it. Unfortunately, the sentiment and belief is not true.

There’s a whole lot to love about science fiction and fantasy (SFF): fabulous world-building, epic adventures, fantastical creatures, awe-inspiring technology. Surely no nonfiction title could live up to the excitement that a good SFF book can deliver?

As a devoted nonfiction reader, I can assure you that is not true! Nonfiction can weave a tale just as irresistible as anything that sprang from a fiction writer’s imagination. A skillful nonfiction author uses the same methods that make fiction so entertaining and applies them to events that happen in real life. And, in some cases, nonfiction books can also shed light on plot points or devices you see in sci-fi and fantasy or on the authors themselves, giving you a better appreciation of their work.

This list features eight nonfiction titles that will interest SFF fans in different ways. No matter which one you choose to dive into first, it is sure to satisfy your need for larger-than-life adventurers and fantastic quests that are far out of the ordinary. You’ll get to travel to places that are inaccessible to most readers, and you’ll even get to see how common SFF tropes bring life to other genres. It’s a great reminder that literary categories are neither discrete nor set in stone—that’s part of the magic of reading.

Accidental Gods by Anna Della Subin An unfortunate and outdated trope you sometimes see in SFF is the white savior: a white person who discovers and is inevitably revered by “inferior” Native peoples, who require the savior’s protection against myriad threats. Accidental Gods is a breathtaking yet respectful exploration of how certain men (always men) were, at various times and for various reasons, regarded as divine entities.

The Dive by Stephen McGinty In this underwater thriller, two men are trapped in a nonfunctional submarine at the bottom of the ocean. Those on the surface must race against time—and the men’s dwindling oxygen supply—to do the impossible and bring them home safely. If you like suspenseful sci-fi tales where people are menaced by inhospitable environments, this is the nonfiction book for you. (J.R.R. Tolkien also gets a brief mention toward the end, for you LOTR fans!)

Welcome to the shady corner between the mundane and the unknown. Light horror, a subcategory of horror, delicately balances all the suspense, eeriness, and supernatural expected from horror with subtlety. Light horror gently calls to the reader, inviting them to explore darker themes without the necessity of jump-scare terror and gore. Think of the imaginative gothic settings of films like Edward Scissorhands over slasher flicks like A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Weaving elements of the supernatural and the uncanny with the quietly macabre, light horror is more about creating an environment of quiet unease rather than racketing up the tension and dread.

Without gore and violence, light horror showcases both the dark and light within characters and settings. Using settings like haunted houses, light horror often explores deeply human themes like grief.  Despite the darkness, whether literal or physical, light horror always makes space for hope.

The gas lamps are lit with dancing shadows on the wall, but it’s nice and warm inside. Light horror can be cozy, even relaxing, despite the lingering unsettling feeling. The monsters may have teeth, but at least they’ve brushed.  

Dear reader, get ready to explore a different kind of fear with these light horror books.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes these books are brand new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, I’m talking about one of my most anticipated memoirs of the season!

Splinters by Leslie Jamison I’ve read just about everything Leslie Jamison has put out, and while her writing has matured and changed over the course of time, she still writes some of the most incredible prose. She has a way of writing a sentence that reads like magic. Previously, she has investigated the personal lives of others, researched writers and other artists who struggled with alcoholism, and explored her own experience with sobriety. This time, she’s writing about the birth of her daughter and her divorce from her daughter’s father.  Splinters looks at Jamison’s splintered identity — as a daughter, mother, wife, girlfriend, artist, academic, writer — and how these many facets of who she is have informed her art. The memoir is divided up into different sections, each examining a state of mind or a phase in Jamison’s life. They build on one another, giving us a more complete picture of Jamison’s lived experience. Jamison loses herself in her new daughter, discovering a new love of her life while simultaneously trying to cope with the disintegration of her marriage. Her divorce is messy and complex, the bitterness lasting years as they both struggle to figure out a way to co-parent their young child. Jamison explores sex and dating, wondering how on earth she can start over with another person, but try again she does. I particularly enjoyed the audiobook edition, which she reads herself. Much of the listening experience feels like we’re sitting across from Jamison at her favorite grungy diner as we listen to her describe these many facets of her personhood. Listening to her narrate her story feels like we’re witnessing her verbally process her experience of early motherhood and all of the messiness that has entailed.

 

For a son of the titular city, reading Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is akin to curling into your lover, your nose dipped in the well of their collarbone, as they detail your mother’s various personality disorders. Yes, Federico, yes, my mother is thoroughly racist and takes every opportunity to remind me, her sometimes destitute child, about the silent cruelty of money. “At least you got to leave,” I want to tell him. “Imagine being stuck with her for the rest of your life.” He would likely understand my irrational attachment; after all, he was so consumed by Spain, its art and its politics, that his country would go on to swallow him whole.

Still, it is crucial for those of us with this sort of umbilical tether to unwind it and test how far it might stretch. In June 1929, following a voyage on the sister liner of the Titanic, Lorca arrived from Spain by way of Southampton, England, to New York, a city he would immediately call a “maddening Babel.” The poet was thirty-one, nursing his wounds from a breakup with a handsome sculptor, Emilio Perojo, whom Lorca maintained used him to gain access to the art world. Lorca had also become estranged from a pair of his Spanish friends and contemporaries, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, and felt hemmed in by the success of his most recent work, Gypsy Ballads. He wrote, “This ‘gypsy’ business gives me an uneducated, uncultured tone … I feel they are trying to chain me down.” With the help of his parents and at the urging of Fernando de los Ríos, a law professor and friend of the family, Lorca enrolled in a summer program at Columbia University. For the better part of a year, in room 617 of Furnald Hall, and then in room 1231 of John Jay Hall, he would write Poet in New York. The language is hallucinatory and toxic, peyote laced with sulfur: pigeon skulls lie in corners; cats choke down frogs; blond blood flows on rooftops everywhere; tongues lick clean the wounds of millionaires. V. S. Pritchett wrote about the book: “What we call civilization, [Lorca] called slime and wire.”

I visited Furnald Hall on a Thursday in January. It was around 3 P.M. The sky, vacuumed of its gauze, had begun to pale. I went as a guest of a friend who teaches at the university, and both of us promised security I’d leave quickly. Perhaps it was because I was rereading the section in Poet called “Poems of Solitude in Columbia University” or because it was shortly before registration for the winter semester, but every sound in the hallways was harsh and detached—hoarse conversations behind half-closed doors, the thin complaint of de-icing salt underfoot. Room 617 was locked, but 618 was being moved into. With the student’s permission, I examined the room and looked out the south-facing window onto campus. The student asked me what or whom I was searching for. I couldn’t say. I couldn’t rewild the sycamore skeletons that were now clinging to the day’s last light; I couldn’t properly conjure the summer of 1929; but I did wonder if it was from this vantage that Lorca dwelled on his former lover, the supposed careerist.

What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness. 

The smallest container you can buy at the Container Store is a rectangular crystal-clear plastic box available in orange, purple, and green. It can contain one AA or two AAA batteries, half a handful of Tic Tacs, or a folded-up tissue. The largest container you can buy at the Container Store is a four-tiered metal shelving unit. It can contain other containers.

Containers mediate us and our stuff. They create boundaries and allow our items to exist multiple feet above the ground. Most spaces are divided by containers. These containers might then be divided by additional containers. Containers form a scaffold, or an architecture. They make walls scalable and underbeds reachable. They allow you to put something down and know where it is the next time you want to pick it up. 

One of the best ways to understand containers is to imagine a world without them. We would have piles. Bracelets, creams, stick-shaped kitchen items, fruit. Small things would get lost under big ones. Or, an alternative: a line of items that snakes through an apartment or house, up and down stairs and spiraling into the center of the room. When you want to find something, you simply walk along the line of items, confronting each individual thing. 

The children’s author Paul Maar tells the story of a boy who cannot tell stories. When his little sister, Susanne, is struggling to fall asleep, tossing and turning in her bed, she asks Konrad to tell her a story. He declines in a huff. Konrad’s parents, by contrast, love telling stories. They are almost addicted to it, and they argue over who will go first. They therefore decide to keep a list, so that everyone gets a go. When Roland, the father, has told a story, the mother puts an r on the list. When Olivia, the mother, tells a story, the father enters a large O. Every now and again, a small s finds its way on to the list in between all the r’s and o’s—Susanne, too, is beginning to enjoy telling stories. The family forms a small storytelling community. Konrad is the exception.

The family is particularly in the mood for stories during breakfast on the weekend. Narrating requires leisure. Under conditions of accelerated communication, we do not have the time, or even the patience, to tell stories. We merely exchange information. Under more leisurely conditions, anything can trigger a narrative. The father, for instance, asks the mother: “Olivia, could you pass the jam please?” As soon as he grasps the jam jar, he gazes dreamily, and narrates:

This reminds me of my grandfather. One day, I might have been eight or nine, grandpa asked for strawberry jam over lunch. Lunch, mind you! At first we thought we had misunderstood him, because we were having a roast with baked potatoes, as we always did on the second of September …

“This reminds me of … ” and “one day” are the ways in which the father introduces his narrations. Narration and remembrance cause each other. Someone who lives completely in the moment cannot narrate anything.

Early in the new year, returning home from the office one evening, I picked up a story by the Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. The opening pages of “An Eye in the Throat” place us in the thrall of an escalating family emergency, one that might belong to a work of autofiction. But in time, the nature of the story’s reality transforms. On finishing—I had to unclench my jaw and pour myself a drink—I realized that the narrative, like a tormenting Magic Eye, could be read in at least two distinct, and equally haunting, ways.

Like Schweblin’s story, several of the works in this issue seem to disclose, as if by optical illusion, a previously hidden plane of reality. Joy Williams gives us Azrael, the angel of death, who mourns the limited possibilities for the transmigration of souls as a result of biodiversity loss. In “Derrida in Lahore” by the French-born writer Julien Columeau, translated from the Urdu by Sana R. Chaudhry, an aspiring scholar studying in Lahore, Pakistan, is introduced to Derrida’s Glas (“You must read this,” his professor tells him, “it has fire inside it. Fire!”) and becomes a deconstructionist zealot. And in Eliot Weinberger’s “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees,” bees become variously the symbols of socialism and constitutional monarchy, good luck and witchcraft, war and peace, and much else besides.

The subjects of our Writers at Work interviews, too, slip between worlds. Jhumpa Lahiri, in her Art of Fiction interview, describes “the woeful treadmill of needing approval” that drove her, at the height of critical and commercial success, to leave her American life behind. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own,” she tells Francesco Pacifico, with whom, in Rome, she spoke in her new language. And in her Art of Poetry interview, Alice Notley describes the need, in her work, to go beyond conscious thought and the “scrounging” of everyday life—beyond, even, the grief of losing loved ones. “You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you,” she tells Hannah Zeavin, before adding, casually, “I started hearing the dead, for example.”

Perhaps a kind of doubleness is fitting for the spring we’re in: the season of hope, which is, this year as ever, filled with dread. When we asked the Swiss artist Nicolas Party to make an artwork for the cover of our new issue, he sent us not one image but two. Like in de Chirico’s The Double Dream of Spring, painted early in the First World War, each image exerts a kind of formal terror, at once seductive and monstrous. We decided that, for the first time in the magazine’s seventy-one-year history, the issue would have twin covers. Subscribers will receive the cover featuring a still life, an array of uncannily sagging apples and pears against rich blue. Buyers at newsstands and bookstores can pick up the version featuring a coastal landscape, albeit one in which the ocean is green and the sky a candy pink. If you’d prefer to alternate between realities, you can always have both.

I’d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but  

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field. 

The tiny, beloved “Salute”—which is not the poem that I mean to discuss—both gathers and separates, does and then undoes what the poem says Schuyler meant to do but never did. (And isn’t this, the play of assembly and disassembly, to a certain extent just what verse is? How part and whole relate or fail to as the poem unfolds in time is a basic drama of poetic form.) Schuyler’s enjambments—at once distinct and soft, like the edge of a leaflet or the margin of a petal—are sites of hesitation where meanings collect before they’re scattered or revised. 

For a second I hear “Like that gather-” as an imperative: Do it that way, gather in that manner, before the noun “gathering” gathers across the margin. I briefly hear “one of each I”—each of us is a field of various “I”s—as the object of the gathering before it becomes the subject who has “planned” it. (The comparative metrical regularity of “Like that gathering of one of each I planned,” the alternating stresses, haunts these enjambments, a prosodic past or frame the poem salutes and breaks with, breaks up.) I am always slightly surprised when “to gather one,” at the end of the seventh line, repeats “of each,” as opposed to modifying a new specific noun, at the left margin of line eight. (This break makes me feel the tension or oscillation between “each” and “kind”—and a kind is a gathering of likes—between the discrete specimen and the class for which it stands, the particular dissolving into exemplarity, when you write it down.)

1. The Divine Celebrity

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.” It is interesting that he felt the need to specify that Lohan had not died, although ultimately his assertion of her power is difficult to deny based on the evidence of Lindsay Lohan, which may not exude the surfer-y, gilded vibe he might have hoped for, but which does act as a poignant document of Lohan’s skill, her raw and uncomfortable magnetism.

“Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability,” Phillips argued in his artist’s statement, “while harnessing the power of the transcendental—the moment in transition. She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence.” “Our own inner eminence” is an odd, not entirely meaningful phrase, used in a typically unmeaningful and art-speak-riddled press release. What the artist seems to say or to imply, however, is that Lohan’s obvious ability to reach inside herself and then—without dialogue—vividly suggest her depths onscreen acts as a piquant reminder of our own complexity, the way each of us is a celebrity in the melodrama of our lives.

What makes Lindsay Lohan art and not a perfume advertisement, aside from the absence of a perfume bottle? The same quality, perhaps, that makes—or made—Lohan herself a star, as well as, once, a sterling actress. All Phillips’s talk of transcendence and the existential may be overblown, but then stars tend to be overblown, as evidenced by the superlatives so often used in descriptions of Hollywood and its denizens: “silver screen,” “golden age,” “legendary,” or “iconic.” “Muses must possess two qualities,” the dance critic Arlene Croce claimed in The New Yorker in 1996, “beauty and mystery, and of the two, mystery is the greater.” At first blush, Lohan might not have seemed like an especially mysterious muse, with her personal life splashed across the tabloids and her upskirt shots all over Google. In fact, her revelations are a trick, the illusion of intimacy possible because she has enough to plumb that we can barely touch the surface. We can see her pubis and her mugshots and the powder in her nostrils, but it is impossible for us, as regular, unfamous people, to know what it feels like to be her.

Inside the Palais d’Iéna, it was dark-colored carpets and dark-colored walls. Chocolaty and rust-colored and warm. There was music that was playing and it was ambient, it was a shudder of synthesizers, it sounded like a womb. A loop of a video made by the Belgian American artist Cécile B. Evans was projected on screens set up on all sides of the room. I was not sure what to do during this time before the show started. I decided that a good thing to do while waiting for the fashion show to start was to orient myself in the space. I watched girls take selfies. I walked past the pit where photographers organized themselves, setting up their cameras. I was pacing, you might say; I was walking fast and with very little purpose.  

Photographers swarmed actresses and actors walking in to the venue wearing full Miu Miu looks—things like teeny-tiny plaid shorts and a navy blue blouse with a puritan collar, or a red two-piece with a miniskirt that is kind of like an evil badminton uniform. Miu Miu girls and theys, I observed, are chic in a way that is like, I’m a pixie, I know my angles, I’m very charming about it. I have never felt like that in my life. Speaking of knowing your angles, I kept getting in the photographers’ shots. Sorry miss, do you mind moving, you’re in the shot, they said to me. I was happy to oblige. Sydney Sweeney walked in with her handlers, glamorously wearing sunglasses inside. Raf Simons, the legendary Belgian designer and co–creative director of Prada, got caught up in the photoshoot of a famous K-pop star, and a friend I was talking with swore she heard him say, Jesus Christ. I wrote a note in my phone that said: have u ever watched a really famous person being interviewed b4? its rlly weird lol. They enter a room and they are swarmed by a whole swath of people. How do they come up for air? I was having trouble with that at that moment, coming up for air. 

I also felt, among other things, that I had a new appreciation for the music of Drake, the chanteuse. How does the song “Club Paradise” go again? No wonder why I feel awkward at this Fashion Week shit! No wonder why I keep fucking up the double-cheek kiss! Ha ha ha.

 

Last June, the Review published Jamie Quatro’s “Little House”—what appears at first glance to be a quiet, traditional story about childhood and family life. Gentle in tone and careful in construction, it leaves the reader discomfited to realize that the narrator has left the thing that drove her to tell it—the real story—almost entirely unsaid. The story is part of a triptych by Quatro, the second part of which, “Yogurt Days,” was published in The New Yorker; in that story, the same narrator remembers her evangelical mother taking her along as she attempted to save the spirit of a man suffering from a mysterious (to the narrator) illness. The third story, “Two Men, Mary,” published in our most recent Winter issue, completes the triptych, and is itself structured in three parts. Anna recalls herself first at sixteen, working in a frozen yogurt shop, and her first sexual encounters with older men; then, decades later, as a published writer on a plane to a literary conference, who has a rendezvous with the man sitting next to her; and finally, in the present, where she turns to a very different kind of surrender. We exchanged emails about the uses of autobiography in fiction, how these stories came about, and what we are to make of their singular narrator, Anna.

 

Which of the stories in this series came first? Were they published in the order you wrote them?

$2.99 Grown by Tiffany D. Jackson Get This Deal

$1.99 The Twenty-One: The True Story of the Youth Who Sued the U.S. Government Over Climate Change by Elizabeth Rusch Get This Deal

$2.99 Creeping Beauty by Andrea Portes Get This Deal

$2.99 Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri Get This Deal

$3.99 Pick-Up Game by ed. by Marc Aronson & Charles R. Smith Get This Deal

$2.99 Mirror Girls by Kelly McWilliams Get This Deal

$1.99 Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein Get This Deal

$1.99 Come Home Safe by Brian G. Buckmire Get This Deal

This originally appeared in our Today in Books daily newsletter, where each day we round up the most interesting stories, news, essays, and other goings on in the world of books and reading. Sign up here if you want to get it.

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Why Does Every Famous Woman Have a Book Club Now?

Of course, it is not every famous woman, and in fact, that hyperbolic headline actually does the very real trend a disservice. A more interesting question is: why is it these kind of famous women? Mostly white. All in the entertainment industry. Mostly between the ages of 27 and 47. I think Gould’s ultimate conclusion is largely the right one: the cultural currency that comes with being seen as aligned with books, primarily upmarket literary fiction, matters to these women. Which is great! Except that it doesn’t seem to matter to the books who get a turn, ever so fleetingly, in an Instagram Reel.

Higher Prices. Fewer Books Sold.

It’s not just your imagination. Books are getting more expensive. More expensive enough apparently to offset that fewer books are being sold. South Africa, strangely, exemplifies both trends, with a 7.7% drop in 2023 number of units sold but a price gain of 9.6%. Is anyone out there trying to correlate this? Are fewer books being sold because the prices are going up? Would the number of books sold be higher if books were cheaper? And if not, why aren’t prices even higher?

Introductory Book Fair Etiquette

I’ve read/followed Rebecca Romney for a long while, and though I am not a buyer of rare books, I find the world completely fascinating. She recently posted a thread, now blog post, about etiquette at rare book fairs (this is aimed at institutional buyers, fwiw). I never articulated this way, but I love reading about the “etiquettes” of micro-communites, be it rare book dealers or baseball players or art dealers or professional fly-fishermen or whatever.

Akira Toriyama was one of the most influential mangaka: he created Dragon Ball in 1984, which would later become the hit series Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super. This action fantasy comedy franchise inspired many other series, like One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach.

On March 7th, the official Dragon Ball Twitter/X account shared that Akira Toriyama had passed away at 68 from acute subdural hematoma. He was still working on several creative projects at the time of his death. He had a small funeral with family.