Books Briefing: Literary award season

November 24, 2020

“I’m going to go melt into a puddle right now,” Charles Yu said after winning the National Book Award for his novel “Interior Chinatown.”

Hi readers,

Here’s your weekly catch-up on everything you need to know going on in the book world.

The news:

At the National Book Awards, Charles Yu won the fiction prize for his novel “Interior Chinatown.” Les Payne and Tamara Payne won the nonfiction award for their biography of Malcolm X, “The Dead Are Arising.” Read more about the winners and the virtual ceremony, a fittingly surreal evening in a year when reality has often been stranger than fiction.
The following day, Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for “Shuggie Bain,” a debut novel about the lonely gay son of an alcoholic mother in 1980s Scotland.
Memoirs have long been a common, fairly uncontroversial project when U.S. presidents leave office. Not this time. The prospect of a Trump memoir is proving divisive in the publishing industry, even though executives acknowledge that such a book would likely sell millions of copies.

The Welsh writer Jan Morris died last week at age 94. Our critic Dwight Garner took the occasion to look back at her “distinctive, elegant, formidable and wickedly snobby” work. And you can read the Times obituary here.
Former President Barack Obama’s new book, “A Promised Land,” arrived nearly four years after he left the White House. Here’s a look at the timing of other presidential memoirs.
Nonfiction out today: “The Freezer Door,” by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore; “The Last American Aristocrat,” by David S. Brown; “Saving Freedom,” by Joe Scarborough.

The critics:

Dwight Garner reviews a wild new satire, Guillermo Stitch’s “Lake of Urine,” which he says has “an opening as promising as any I’ve read this year.” The novel goes on to offer “strange harbingers, offbeat mental exfoliations, subterranean impulses, verbal ambuscades and warty, warty manifestations of joy, wit and lust.”
Parul Sehgal writes about “Funeral Diva,” a blend of memoir and poetry by Pamela Sneed, which remembers the contributions and leadership of lesbians during the height of the AIDS crisis. “Sneed is an acclaimed reader of her own poetry, and the book has the feeling of live performance,” Sehgal writes. “Its strength is in its abundance, its desire for language to stir body as well as mind.”
Jennifer Szalai reviews “A Question of Freedom,” by the historian William G. Thomas III, about the generations of several enslaved families in Maryland who sued for their freedom throughout the decades before the Civil War. Szalai calls it a “rich, roiling history that Thomas recounts with eloquence and skill.”

That’s all for now. Please stay in touch and let me know what you think — whether it’s about this newsletter, our reviews, our podcast, our literary calendar, our Instagram or what you’re reading. We on the Books desk read all of it, and I’ll make every effort to write back. You can reach me at books@nytimes.com.

All my best,

Joumana Khatib

Books at The New York Times

Book Your Calendar Here: 2020’s Major Literary Events

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