The List: 2015 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction
Today we want to congratulate the ten finalists for the National Book Awards. We have included a quote from five of the longlisted books in case you are thinking of purchasing this list–we think you should!
- Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide (Pantheon Books) “We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise.”
- Karen E. Bender, Refund: Stories (Counterpoint Press) “…nothing but numbness and résumés. Trying to figure out how fast we could keep from sinking. Could we dream money and see it show up in the checking account? How little could we spend, eat?”
- Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family (Scout Press/Simon & Schuster) “Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it’s to be that mother.”
- Angela Flournoy, The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) “He look like the type to bring a list with him into the bedroom, and he ain’t done makin love till he check off everything he got in his mind to do.”
- T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville (William Morrow/HarperCollins) “Berkeley was Berzerkeley, while Berkeley the school was Cal. The East Bay, where Berzerkeley was located, supposedly suburban, felt plenty busy. Collectively, it was the Bay Area, a megalopolis—oh how that word polished his tongue—where the elsewhere unimaginable was mere mundanity.”
(via citylightsbooks)