National Book Foundation (Posts tagged NBAwards Longlist)

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

“For the majority of us, Paris is an unknown land. We approach her with mixed feeings: superiority, curiosity, and nervous anticipation." 

From Der Deutsche Wegleister für Paris: Wohin in Paris? (The German Guide to Paris: What to do in Paris).

According to Ronald C. Rosbottom, author of When Paris Went Dark , this 16-page pamphlet published within one month of the Occupation would grow to more than one hundred pages and was made available to the thousands of Nazi soldiers who visited the capital over the next four years. 

Read an excerpt of When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation: 1940-1944, LONGLISTED for the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction. 

(Photos: Creative Commons)

Lit history Paris WW2 Ronald C. Rosbottom NBAwards Longlist
“ “I’m going to speak about strange places that many of them have never heard of— places that are now the battleground of civilization.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking to his speechwriter in preparation for his “Fireside Chat on Progress...

“I’m going to speak about strange places that many of them have never heard of— places that are now the battleground of civilization.”

— President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking to his speechwriter in preparation for his “Fireside Chat on Progress of War” of February 23, 1942. 

From The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942, by Nigel Hamilton, LONGLISTED for the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction. 

(photo credit: FDR Library)

LIt history WW2 FDR NBAwards Longlist
“ Okay, so I’m going to try to write a book that fully explores the life of a special needs girl, two of them in fact. And I’m going to do in in alternating voices—in first person. How do I get in the heads of people that I am not? Whose mental...

 Okay, so I’m going to try to write a book that fully explores the life of a special needs girl, two of them in fact. And I’m going to do in in alternating voices—in first person.

How do I get in the heads of people that I am not? Whose mental abilities are different that mine?

First, I have a background. I taught special needs (the upper end) in my classes when I taught high school.

Some would be able to read and some never would, but they were in my reading classes nevertheless.

I saw first hand what they could and couldn’t do. What their frustrations were and were not. How tired they became when we did the same things over and again. How they needed variety just as much if not more as the higher-functioning students did.

I learned that one thing the special needs student understood is that he or she is special needs. Knew exactly what that needs was. As Biddy puts it, what her “dys” is—her dysfunction.

These students may have a hard time learning, but they have had years to learn that they are different and that is frustrating.

I learned that not all special need students are patient, naive and kind. Some have lower boiling points than others. Some resent the attitudes that the “normal” people in society have toward them. I learned that they have coping skills that give them insight that can amaze. Or sometimes have tunnel vision and anger issues that come from their disabilities.

I did research, of course, but it kind of told me the same things that I saw in anecdotal form. I learned at what point in the I.Q. the idea of grammar and tense seems to form. I learned at what point in the I.Q. reading can happen. I learned that dysgraphia is the least diagnosed form of the spectrum. But possibly not the least prevalent.

I learned a lot of facts in my research, but I learned more from the students. I learned that inability to read or write or do more than simple math is not really the issue with most of the students.

It’s that people make assumptions about them that are not true. These students can become and will become and are now functioning members of society.

What they want most is to be appreciated for who they are.

I can write that. It’s not so different than anybody else.

(via Cynsations: Guest Post: Gail Giles, author of Girls Like Us, on Writing Across Mental Abilities)

Girls Like Us, Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature

Source: cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com
Lit fiction YA YPL Gail Giles Girls Like Us We Need Diverse Books NBAwards Longlist

“Removal” lies at the heart of the story we commonly tell about Indians in the nineteenth century. At first glance, removal and the grand project of “civilizing” heathen peoples appear to be opposites. Yet on the deepest level, they were joined—were, indeed, different expressions of the same impulse. For the civilizing process imposed a complete renunciation of traditional lifeways; as such, it was another form, a cultural form, of removal.

Excerpted from The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic, by John Demos, Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Lit American History Native American history Trail of Tears Native Americans John Demos NBAwards Longlist
emilystjohnmandel
emilystjohnmandel: “ Last night in Milwaukee: a collaborative reading/performance at Boswell Books. Shakespearean actors performed the scene from Lear that opens the book; I picked up at the line where the actor dies and read for a while, they...
emilystjohnmandel

Last night in Milwaukee: a collaborative reading/performance at Boswell Books. Shakespearean actors performed the scene from Lear that opens the book; I picked up at the line where the actor dies and read for a while, they dramatized the book’s interview sections—the shock and joy of hearing your text brought to life—we closed with a chapter where I read and they said lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve never done a more thrilling event. These weeks of strange new things.

"What does it feel like?" the sales rep asked when he picked me up at the Milwaukee airport the other day, asking about the National Book Award longlist. I don’t know. It’s wonderful. It doesn’t always seem quite real. It makes me very happy and also I’m aware at all times they could just as easily have picked an entirely different set of ten books for the fiction long list. This stuff’s crazily subjective.

Above: the art museum, not far from my hotel. I walked there yesterday with a few hours to kill between a radio interview and the Boswell event. It was closed when I visited, but beautiful to look through it at the lake on the other side.

Lit fiction Station Eleven NBAwards Longlist
alicejamesbooks
alicejamesbooks: “ Congrats to Fanny Howe, author of “Robeson Street,” who is a National Book Award finalist, for her book, “Second Childhood!” Check out the article in the New York Times, here: bit.ly/nationalbook This is an incredible honor and we...
alicejamesbooks

Congrats to Fanny Howe, author of “Robeson Street,” who is a National Book Award finalist, for her book, “Second Childhood!” Check out the article in the New York Times, here: bit.ly/nationalbook

This is an incredible honor and we will be waiting with baited breath for when they reveal the five finalists on October 15th. Good luck, Fanny!

(Image credit to The New York Times)

lit poetry Fanny Howe NBAwards Longlist
public-radio-market
public-radio-market: “ Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr Buy Book | Kindle The Leonard Lopate Show: The Hidden Drama in the Life of One of the Country’s Best Playwrights, Tennessee Williams On Point: The Real Story Of...
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Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

Buy  Buy Book | Kindle

The Leonard Lopate Show: The Hidden Drama in the Life of One of the Country’s Best Playwrights, Tennessee Williams

On Point: The Real Story Of Playwright Tennessee Williams

Longlisted for the National Book Award. The definitive biography of America’s greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker.

John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation’s sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams’s warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.

With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams’s life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.

The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams’s relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.

Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

lit biography playwriting tennessee williams John Lahr NBAwards Longlist