Sigrid Nunez and Anne Enright are among the winners of a $175,000 literary prize
NEW YORK — National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright are among eight recipients of literary honors that include a $175,000 cash award. The Windham-Campbell Prizes are given each year for literary achievement and to enable writers to work independently.
Other winners announced Tuesday include legal scholar Patricia Williams, dramatists Roy Williams and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, poets Anthony V. Capildeo and Tongo Eisen-Martin and essayist Rana Dasgupta.
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2 days ago
- Yahoo
Susan Choi Recommends a Book So Engrossing It Made Her (Almost) Lose Her Luggage
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Welcome to Shelf Life, books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you're on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you're here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too. What began as a short story in The New Yorker is now Susan Choi's sixth and latest novel, Flashlight, about a man who goes missing—and the resulting trauma for his family. Like the family in the book, Choi lived in Japan for a short period during her childhood. (Nor is this the first time she's shared autobiographical details with her characters: Her father was a math professor, like a character in 2003's A Person of Interest; she went to graduate school, the setting of 2013's My Education; and she attended a theater program in high school, as do the protagonists in 2019's National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise, for which she wrote at least 3 different endings.) Her second novel, 2004's American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and adapted into a film, and she has also written a children's book, Camp Tiger. Choi teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, yet one literary goal remains elusive: 'Trying to read 50 books a year,' she says. 'I've never achieved the goal and some years I don't even come close, but I love trying.' The Indiana-born, Texas-raised, New York-based bestselling author studied literature at Yale University; was once fired from a literary agency for being too much of a 'literary snob'; was a fact-checker at The New Yorker and co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker with editor David Remnick; won an ASME Award for Fiction for 'The Whale Mother' in Harper's Magazine; and has two sons. Likes: theater; fabric stores; kintsugi; the Fort Greene Park Greenmarket; savory buns; flowers. Dislikes: being on stage; low-hovering helicopters. Good at: rocking her gray hair. Bad at: cleaning menorahs; coming up with book titles. Scroll through the reads she recommends below. It's not exactly a missed-the-train moment, but I was re-reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov while waiting on a train platform [once], and when the train pulled in I stood up, still reading, boarded the train, still reading, and sat down, still reading…until at some point, after the train pulled away, I realized that I had left my luggage on the platform. Philip Roth's Everyman. I never would have thought a novel about the bodily decline and eventual death of a hyper-masculine Jewish guy who mistreats many of the women in his life—a lot like Philip Roth—could make me literally heave-sob at the end. But this is why Roth is such an incredible writer: He makes us feel enormous compassion for people we don't even like. Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, which kaleidoscopically compresses the stormy history of 20th-century Germany into barely a hundred pages, while holding the focus steady on a single plot of land. It's one of those books that makes you want to write. All of Proust. Or even just some decent amount of Proust. I love the prose but also find it so exquisite it's almost unbearable to continue reading for any length of time, at least for me, which makes me feel like a total failure as a reader. I might have to set aside a year of my life just to read Proust. Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall is impossible to put down, and it's also so tensely coiled from the very beginning that reading it I sometimes forgot to breathe! In some ways it's a 'small' story—about a girl and her parents doing a crazy-seeming reenactment of prehistoric life in the English countryside—but then it turns out to be about the biggest things, like what it means to be a people, or a nation, or even human. Rachel Khong's Real Americans, which I am so riveted by that as soon as I finish these questions, I'm picking it back up. It's a story about three people who, despite how deeply they feel for each other—and how deeply we feel for them—cannot manage to be a family. My heart is already half-broken and I'm only halfway through it. Paul Beatty's The Sellout. I was sitting on the beach in Maui (the one time I have ever been to Maui), reading that book instead of swimming, and a stranger came up to me to ask what it was because apparently I was laughing so hard I'd attracted general attention. In Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, two young guerilla fighters, boy and girl, fall madly in love and start having trysts in the back of an ambulance. The girl also has a pet squirrel that she's been carrying around in her bra, and, during the trysts, the squirrel runs frantically around the back of the ambulance. These are some of the funniest, wildest, most heartfelt sex scenes ever put on paper. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read it every few years because it feels new every time and, at the same time, it feels so familiar, like returning to a favorite place. I love every single sentence in it, even the sentences that are totally over-the-top (and there are a lot of them!) because they remind me that Fitzgerald was actually a fallible human being, capable of writing very over-the-top sentences sometimes. Sigrid Nunez's A Feather on the Breath of God shocked me the first time I read it because it really felt like the book was looking at me, like it knew exactly who I was. The protagonist has, like me, a real culture-clash background, and up to the point in my life when I read the book—the '90s—I'd never encountered that in fiction, so it was very emotional when I finally did. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Just read it. You'll thank me. Renee Gladman is one of my absolute favorite living writers/artists, yet I was totally unaware of her until maybe six years ago when I was recommended her work by an employee—I am so sorry I don't know his name—at my local indie bookstore. Now it feels unimaginable to me that I ever lived my life without Renee Gladman! Everything by Ali Smith, and Ali Smith herself. She is such a brilliant, compassionate, elating observer of us humans and the strange things we do. The London Library. A friend who's a member showed it to me a few years ago, and I never wanted to leave. Maybe they'll set up a hammock for me! PEN America, because they support freedom of expression, which none of us can take for granted anymore.$14.40 at at at at at at at at at at You Might Also Like The 15 Best Organic And Clean Shampoos For Any And All Hair Types 100 Gifts That Are $50 Or Under (And Look Way More Expensive Than They Actually Are)
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Vogue
05-06-2025
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Susan Choi on the Sprawling Stories Behind Her New Novel, Flashlight
Susan Choi is known for writing novels that mine enormous richness from highly specific settings, whether a high school-level theater program in 2019's Trust Exercise, a sexually charged campus environment in 2013's My Education, or a life on the run from the FBI in 2003's American Woman. But her latest book, Flashlight—out now from Macmillan Publishers—is perhaps her most ambitious effort yet. In Flashlight, a Korean national named Serk (formerly Seok) leaves the Japan of his youth to build a new life in the United States. What follows is a chronicle of four generations' worth of his family life—the precision and emotional resonance of Choi's sentences proving endlessly dazzling. This week, Vogue spoke to Choi about how winning the National Book Award in 2019 affected (or didn't affect, as the case may be) the process of writing Flashlight, digging into historical research about Korean-Japanese relations, and her preoccupation with abduction stories. The conversation has been edited and condensed. Vogue: What did the craft process of writing this book look like for you? Susan Choi: Oh, gosh, the process was so…I don't want to say chaotic, because I think that that gives an impression of a lot of energy and movement and this was much more slow, meandering, confused, you know, like a blindfolded person trying to navigate a very complicated obstacle course. I mean, I really struggled with this book. I feel like it evolved in a lot of disconnected bursts of writing that then required me to go back and go in circles. It was a composition process kind of like no other. Honestly, it was more like the first book I ever wrote than my sixth book. I just felt like I'd never written a book before. How did it feel to embark on a new project after winning the 2019 National Book Award in Fiction for Trust Exercise? I have to say, it wasn't really on my mind, and I'm so grateful for that. I definitely am someone who I would have thought would be really prone to finding that really stressful, but it was very hard to even connect those two facts in my mind. It feels so strange to say this, but it was partly thanks to COVID; like, COVID was such a huge rupture in our shared reality and in my individual reality, and this book really kind of grew out of COVID. I published the short story that now forms the very opening pages of the book during COVID—that was something that I had been working on during quarantine in 2020—and then started growing the rest of the book out of that. I just wasn't really thinking much about 2019, or the National Book Award, or the fact that this book, if it even ever came to exist, would follow the previous book. There was a big gap that separated those two realities, and I think it wasn't until this book was really close to being finished that I was like, Oh, this is the follow-up to that, and in the experience of any outsider to my life, this will be the next thing that comes after that other thing. I'm really glad I didn't think about that much before, because it feels very strange. I don't want to preoccupy myself about: Is this a good follow-up? Is it a weird follow-up? Is it a bad follow-up? It just is, and I can't change it now.
