[All of the below is excerpted from, and linked at the top to, the
New York Times article]
"Charles Yu won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday for his mind-bending satire, “Interior Chinatown,” a sendup of Hollywood and Asian-American stereotypes. "
"Fiction finalists included Rumaan Alam’s quiet and eerie apocalyptic domestic drama, “
Leave the World Behind”; Deesha Philyaw’s short story collection, “
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies”; Lydia Millet’s “
A Children’s Bible,” a novel that explores the chaos of climate change; and
Douglas Stuart’s autobiographical novel “
Shuggie Bain,” which is set in 1980s Glasgow and was also a Booker finalist."
"The prize for translated literature went to Yu Miri’s novel “
Tokyo Ueno Station,” which was translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles, and is narrated by a ghost who visits a park where he lived when he was homeless."
"The award for translated literature — a category that was added
in 2018 — this year included works written in Arabic, Spanish, German and Swedish. They were Pilar Quintana’s “The Bitch,” about a Colombian woman’s relationship with an orphaned puppy; “High as the Waters Rise,” a debut novel about an oil rig worker by the German poet Anja Kampmann; Adania Shibli’s “
Minor Detail,” which centers on a woman in Ramallah who decides to investigate the decades-old murder of a Palestinian teenager; and Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel, “The Family Clause,” about a painful family reunion in Stockholm."
"The award for poetry went to the poet and translator Don Mee Choi’s collection “
DMZ Colony,” a collage of survivor accounts, prose, and quotations with photographs and drawings that takes its name from Korea’s Demilitarized Zone."
"The novelist Walter Mosley, who is perhaps best known for his mystery series featuring the detective Easy Rawlins, received the foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime achievement award that previously has gone to Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo and Ursula K. Le Guin. Mr. Mosley, who is the first Black man to receive the award in its 32-year history, remarked on how long overdue that milestone was: “One might be cowed by the monumental negative space surrounding the pinprick of light that this award represents,” he said. “Is this a dying gasp or a first breath?”"
. She ended deleting her account.
