Read These National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists on Legible
by Tania Runyan
As an author, I find the image of being encircled by book critics to be a little intimidating, like a grown-up Ring Around the Rosie game in which my ratings, sales, and confidence all fall down with just a few sinister keystrokes and judgmental brows. Also, tweed.
But the National Book Critics Circle is actually a cool group of people who wear all manner of fabrics, a non-profit collective that “honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature.” You can’t go wrong with honoring and fostering, especially when it brings deserving titles into the national forefront for readers to enjoy. Each year, the NBCC awards six books from the categories of autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. At Legible, we’re excited to congratulate these NBCC finalists from our catalog!
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin. Nominated in the autobiography category, Gay Bar traces the author’s journey through the “clubs, pubs, and dives” that would shape his life and identity. Written in dazzling, stylish prose, Gay Bar “is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.”
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, by Rebecca Donner. This NBCC nominee, which appears on over a dozen other best book lists, chronicles the life of Donner’s great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack. Born in Milwaukee, Harnack enrolled in a PhD program in Germany, where she began to hold secret meetings and eventually formed the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. Through extensive archival research, Donner combines “biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story” to reconstruct a truly remarkable story.
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith. Clint Smith’s debut nonfiction book is at the forefront of the national conversation about slavery’s legacy. One of President Obama’s favorite books of 2021 (and named a top book by, oh, basically every publication that reviews books), How the Word is Passed takes readers on a tour of monuments and landmarks that tell the story of how slavery has “left its imprint on centuries of American history.”
Bonus
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, by Tom Lin just won the Carnegie medal for fiction!
