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New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Aleksei Navalny Among National Book Critics Circle Award Winners
A posthumous memoir by the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, which detailed his fight against autocracy and corruption in Russia and was published eight months after he died in prison, won a National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Announcing the award, Rebecca Hussey, a member of the autobiography committee, praised the memoir, 'Patriot,' as a masterpiece and 'an eyewitness account of history, and a work of moral imperative and literary intelligence.' Hisham Matar's novel 'My Friends,' a story about a Libyan man living in exile in London, won the fiction prize. The awards, which were announced Thursday at a ceremony at the New School in New York City, are among the most highly regarded literary prizes in the United States. The winners are chosen by book critics instead of committees made up of authors or academics, which is how most literary prizes are administered. The organization, which dates to 1974, is made up of more than 800 critics and review editors. This year's awards recognized works published in 2024 and were open to authors of books published in English in the United States. Along with awards in categories like biography, criticism, autobiography, fiction and poetry, the group also recognizes individuals and organizations for their work in support of literary culture. This year, Lauren Michele Jackson, a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of 'White Negroes,' received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. The award, named in honor of a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, goes to an N.B.C.C. member for literary criticism. The service award was given to Lori Lynn Turner, the associate director of the New School's creative writing program. Sandra Cisneros, the author of the groundbreaking novel 'The House on Mango Street,' whose work helped pave the way for Mexican American and other Latino writers, received the lifetime achievement award. Third World Press, one of the largest independent Black-owned presses in the U.S., which was founded in 1967 and has published major Black writers such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and Gwendolyn Brooks, won the Toni Morrison Achievement Award. Below is a list of this year's award-winning titles. 'Patriot: A Memoir' by Aleksei Navalny, translated from Russian by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel, is a memoir Navalny started writing after surviving a near-fatal poisoning with the lethal nerve agent Novichok in Siberia in 2020, and continued writing while in prison, where he died at age 47. 'Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar' by Cynthia Carr, is a biography of the transgender actress and star of some of Andy Warhol's films. 'There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,' is Hanif Abdurraqib's best seller about how sports can anchor us to a sense of place, told through the story of a 2002 basketball game in Columbus, Ohio, where he grew up. 'My Friends' by Hisham Matar, follows a young Libyan man who is granted asylum in London after he is targeted for attending an anti-Qaddafi protest, and has to rebuild a new life exile. 'Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space' by Adam Higginbotham, is a propulsive and devastating account of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, and the causes behind the disaster. 'Wrong Norma' by Anne Carson, is a collection of verse that often reads like essays or prose, and covers such wide ranging subjects as snow, Joseph Conrad, Flaubert, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus and Carson's father. 'A Last Supper of Queer Apostles' by Pedro Lemebel, translated from Spanish by Gwendolyn Harper, is a selection of essays about political and cultural icons including Che Guevara and Elizabeth Taylor, the messy aftermath of following the collapse of authoritarian rule under Augusto Pinochet and living through the AIDS epidemic in Chile. 'Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir' by Tessa Hulls, is a graphic memoir that tells the story of the author's family, folding in reflections on Chinese history, immigration, and trauma.
New York Times
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
From Welcoming New Life to Mourning Its Loss, in 22 Weeks
There are two fierce, fragile fighters in 'Firstborn,' Lauren Christensen's touching memoir about the life and death of her tiny daughter, Simone, who was stillborn 22 weeks into Christensen's pregnancy. The great accomplishment of this book is that I feel I have gotten to know and care for both tenacious people — perhaps Simone a little more than her mother, through her mother's book. Christensen's journey starts in her 30s with a series of unforeseeable events, all told with dry, offhand charm. These begin when Christensen surprises herself by loving a novel with a taxi-yellow cover that crosses her desk at The New York Times Book Review, where she works as an editor. Smitten, she finishes it in one sitting and, when she runs into a colleague, surprises herself further — while maybe a little bit high on 'tiny edibles' — by praising the book to the skies yet struggling to recall its title. (In what is either a running gag or an act of assiduous restraint, she never names it in her memoir, but there are enough clues for a reader to identify it as Gabriel Bump's 2020 novel 'Everywhere You Don't Belong.') After the review runs, the author follows her on Twitter and she follows him back; one thing leads to another until finally — after much video chatting during Covid lockdowns — they fall madly, unstoppably in love and buy a house together. Christensen's narrative style underlines interesting particulars while sliding over much that we are left to guess at. What we don't know, we may not need to know. (To paraphrase Henry James, there are some conversations we are not meant to overhear.) One of my favorite passages in the book concerns the way Christensen both did and did not want a child. Astutely, she notices every waver, every 'maybe, but.' According to her, 'A life with Gabe alone seemed to me as full as a life could possibly be.' According to her sensible therapist, to whom Christensen gives full credit, 'if I was neither menopausal nor using any form of birth control, she said, then I was trying to become pregnant.' And so she does. Yet in the kind of foreshadowing that life offers, the pregnancy is touched from the start by mortality. As Christensen undergoes routine ultrasounds and meets her midwife, her family is simultaneously grieving and supporting her beloved grandfather Gong Gong, who is suffering from Parkinson's and memory failure at the end of his long life. Christensen asserts his right — and hers, and ours — to be something other than dignified, to be 'miraculous and embarrassing, fundamentally ungovernable' in our bodies. 'Despite our delusions,' she writes, 'none of us ever had much control over our lives, or our deaths, at all.' Gong Gong's decline lets us meet the rest of Christensen's family: her mother, who grieves by doing what must be done, her younger brother, her grandmother, her stepfather, her father and more extended family, who come to us not as full portraits but as supporting characters whose meaning and role remain clear even if their faces and personalities are not quite defined. It is in the painful, detailed events of Simone's death in her mother's womb and the wrenching decision to terminate the pregnancy — along with the politics of that choice, and the urgency to ensure the mother survives even though the baby will not and cannot — that Christensen's spare, sometimes glancing style serves so well. Every moment, every transition, from first doctor's meeting to Simone's last heartbeat to the final hugs from the mostly excellent and caring nurses, is given to us. The title 'Firstborn' is plainly a reference to Simone, but in this memoir of mothers and daughters it is equally a reference to Christensen herself. There is the thread throughout of Christensen's reunion with her mother, a hard-working businesswoman whose frequent absences during Christensen's childhood are mentioned many times, and forgiven many times, until there are no complaints and no need to forgive. There is just love, and the care a mother gives her daughter, no matter what; and finally and always the love this mother, Lauren Christensen, gave her daughter, Simone, in this life and beyond.
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
John Casey, Novelist of Salty, Rough-Hewn Characters, Dies at 86
John Casey, a writer of lyric yet taut prose in novels, essays and short stories who won the National Book Award in 1989 for 'Spartina,' the story of a rough-hewn fisherman that reviewers called the best American story of nautical life since Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea,' died on Feb. 22 at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86. His daughters Clare and Julie Casey said the cause was complications of dementia. Mr. Casey, who spent most of his literary career as a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, was best known for his pinpoint renderings of blue-collar characters, like Dick Pierce, the Rhode Island boatman at the center of 'Spartina,' whom the author referred to as a 'swamp Yankee.' The novel revolves around both Pierce's romantic entanglements — long married, he starts an affair and gets his lover pregnant — and his struggles to build a boat. Spartina, a sea grass, becomes the unifying metaphor of the book. 'Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water,' Mr. Casey wrote. 'Smart grass. If he ever got his big boat built he might just call her Spartina, though he ought to call her after his wife.' Mr. Casey won a National Book Award in 1989 for his novel 'Spartina' about a married fisherman and his romantic entanglements. Credit... Alfred A. Knopf, New York The novelist Susan Kenney, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called the novel 'splendidly conceived, flawlessly rendered and totally absorbing.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Adapting the Twists and Turns of ‘Conclave'
The screenwriter Peter Straughan has become adept at taking well known — and beloved — books and adapting them for the big and small screens. He was first nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the 2011 film 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,' based on the classic John le Carré spy novel, and then adapted Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' trilogy into an award-winning season of television, with an adaptation of the third novel coming out soon. Now he has been nominated for a second Oscar: for his screenplay for 'Conclave,' based on Robert Harris's political thriller set in the secret world of a papal election. 'It's almost like mosaic work,' Straughan tells Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, about adapting books. 'You have all these pieces; sometimes they're going to be laid out in a very similar order to the book, sometimes a completely different order. Sometimes you're going to deconstruct and rebuild completely.' In the third episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, Cruz talks with Straughan about his process of translating a book to the screen, and about the moments in ''Conclave' that he found most exciting to adapt. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
