2023 - Blackouts by
Short-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction A Must-Read: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Boston Herald, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Bay Area Reporter, Datebook, Electric Literature, The Stacks, Them, Publishers Weekly "Sweeping, ingenious . . . A kiss to build a dream on." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective. Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book--Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns--and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? A book about storytelling--its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change--and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres's Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.
2022 - The Rabbit Hutch by
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * The standout literary debut that everyone is talking about * "Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny."--The Guardian Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building. An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents -- neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives. Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom. "Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies―the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations."--Raven Leilani, author of Luster
2021 - Hell of a Book by 
2020 - Interior Chinatown by
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. "One of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire." --The Washington Post Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration--Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
2019 - Trust Exercise by
FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION "Electrifying" (People) * "Masterly" (The Guardian) * "Dramatic and memorable" (The New Yorker) * "Magic" (TIME) * "Ingenious" (The Financial Times) * "A gonzo literary performance" (Entertainment Weekly) * "Rare and splendid" (The Boston Globe) * "Remarkable" (USA Today) * "Delicious" (The New York Times) * "Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed--or untoyed with--by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls--until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true--though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place--revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
The 2023 fiction prize went to Justin Torres (New York City, New York, 1980) for his second novel, Blackouts. Combining the fictional stories of two men in a psychiatric institution and the real-life 1941 report "Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns" by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, the novel deals with queer identity and historical suppression of LGBT culture.
In the video below, the announcement and Torres' acceptance speech:
The 2023 poetry prize went to Craig Santos Perez (Mongmong-Toto-Maite, Guåhan [Guam], 1980) for his seventh collection, from unincorporated territory [åmot] (all lowercase in the original). It is also the fifth in a series, with previous subtitles hacha, saina, guma', and lukao, in which the author uses poetry to analyze and subvert colonialism and its maps, aided in this by an extensive usage of his native Chamorro language.
In the video below, the announcement and Santos Perez' acceptance speech:
On March 16, 1950, publishers, editors, writers, and critics gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City to celebrate the first annual National Book Awards (NBAs). Their aim was to award books of the highest quality written by American authors and published by American publishers, in order to expand the audience of American literature and enhance the cultural value of great writing in America. Assigned on four Award categories (Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature), the prize soon affirmed itself as the most important in the United States.
2023 - From Unincorporated Territory [åmot] by
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of experimental and visual poems dives into the history and culture of the poet's homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo'åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
2022 - Punks by
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, PUNKS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, PUNKS weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, PUNKS reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry. "John Keene's PUNKS is utterly brilliant. The range, vision, depth and humanity he brings to the page are as galactic as Banneker's astral wanderings, as crisp as the chordal cutting of a searching horn, as courageous and small as a nose wide open. Keene's masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened, and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence. Amen to this exploration!"--Tyehimba Jess Poetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies.
2021 - Floaters by
Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love. Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry. Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love--even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise. The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl's gently racist question. Whether celebrating the visionaries--the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets--or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father's Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.
2020 - DMZ Colony by
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi'sDMZ Colony is atour de forceof personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book,Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
2019 - Sightlines by
Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award"The sight lines is Sze's 10th collection are just thatâe*imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity." âe*The New York TimesFrom the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers,Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent--and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry."These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests." âe*Lit Hub"The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems inSight Lines." âe*Library Journal