35 results for "National Book Award"

The Ocean at the End of the Lane A Novel

Neil Gaiman
#1 New York Times Bestseller From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, a haunting novel that explores the awesome power of memory, friendship, and sacrifice―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee "A novel about the truths--some wonderful, some terrible--that children know and adults do not." --Time Magazine Returning to his childhood home to attend a funeral, a middle-aged man is drawn back to a place once alive with monsters and magic; to a past where the impossible is all too frighteningly real . . . A haunting meditation on memory, wonder, friendship, and sacrifice, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was named "Book of the Year" by the UK National Book Awards, is a groundbreaking triumph of storytelling as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
HarperCollins Publishers 2021 192 pages

The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman,Dave McKean
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, an ingenious and captivating reimagining of Rudyard Kipling's adventure The Jungle Book that is a glorious meditation on love, loss, survival, sacrifice, and what it means to truly be alive―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee. Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would have been completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy--an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack--who has already killed Bod's family. . . By turns macabre, uplifting, sinister, and heartwarming, Neil Gaiman's #1 national bestseller―winner of the Carnegie and Newbury Medals and the Hugo Award―is a "novel of wonder . . . a tale of unforgettable enchantment" (New York Times Book Review).
William Morrow 2021-10-19 304 pages

Deacon King Kong

McBride, James
_x2B50_ CHOSEN BY BARACK OBAMA AS A FAVOURITE READ OF 2020 _x2B50_ NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK _x2B50_ TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2020, NEW YORK TIMES 'Hilarious, pitch-perfect... one of the year's best novels.' The Washington Post From the winner of a National Book Award and author of the bestselling memoir,The Color of Water, and The Good Lord Bird , a TV series starring Ethan Hawke The year is 1969. In a housing project in south Brooklyn, a shambling old church deacon called Sportcoat shoots - for no apparent reason - the local drug-dealer who used to be part of the church's baseball team. The repercussions of that moment draw in the whole community, from Sportcoat's best friend - Hot Sausage - to the local Italian mobsters, the police (corrupt and otherwise), and the stalwart ladies of the Five Ends Baptist Church. DEACON KING KONG is a book about a community under threat, about the ways people pull together in an age when the old rules are being rewritten. It is very funny in places, and heartbreaking in others. From a prize-winning storyteller, this New York Times bestseller shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, and that the communities we build are fragile but vital. ______________________ ' Deacon King Kong is deeply felt, beautifully written and profoundly humane; McBride's ability to inhabit his characters' foibled, all-too-human interiority helps transform a fine book into a great one' The New York Times Book Review What Goodreads readers are saying- ***** ' Deacon King Kong is one of those novels whose brilliance sneaks up on you. I haven't been this pleasantly surprised by a book in a while.' ***** 'I do believe I just finished one of my all time favorite books. I loved every minute spent with Sportcoat and his community. A good old fashioned yarn shot through with truth, spirit, and humor. I LOVED it!' ***** 'This book was a balm for my soul, a portrait of a black church community circa 1969 with sweet characters (well, most of them), interconnections that stretch back decades, and a plot with more than one mystery at its heart.' ***** '"Deacon" has the texture of folk lore and fable mixed with the unexpected rhythms of jazz and the noisy streets of late 1960s Brooklyn.' ***** 'The ending was one of those where you clutch your heart and want to hug the book (or your Kindle).'
Doubleday 2020 370 pages

Trust Exercise

Perfection Learning Corporation,Susan Choi
WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Electrifying" ( People ) - "Masterly" ( The Guardian ) - "Dramatic and memorable" ( The New Yorker ) - "Magic" ( TIME ) - " Ingenious" ( The Financial Times ) - A gonzo literary performance" ( Entertainment Weekly ) - "Rare and splendid" ( The Boston Globe ) - "Remarkable" ( USA Today ) - "Delicious" ( The New York Times ) - "Book groups, meet your next selection (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving "Brotherhood of the Arts," two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed--or untoyed with--by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school's walls--until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true--though it's not false, either. It takes until the book's stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place--revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
Perfection Learning Corporation 2020

The Mars Room A Novel

Rachel Kushner
TIME ’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and t he NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“ The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.” It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” ( The Wall Street Journal ), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” ( The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” ( Entertainment Weekly ).
Simon and Schuster 2019-05-07 352 pages

The Fixer

Bernard Malamud
The Fixer is the winner of the 1967 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel. Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.
Pocket Books 1989-05-15 306 pages

The Volcano Lover A Romance

Susan Sontag
Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, this unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award-winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsessions, and, above all, love.
Macmillan 1992 419 pages

Forest dark

Krauss, Nicole
From the bestselling, twice-Orange Prize-shortlisted, National Book Award-nominated author comes a tale of transformation; a richly layered masterpiece' ( Financial Times ) A brilliant novel ' Philip Roth Impossible to put down ' Independent Dazzling ' Guardian Jules Epstein has vanished from the world. He leaves no trace but a rundown flat patrolled by a solitary cockroach, and a monogrammed briefcase abandoned in the desert. To Epstein 's mystified family, the disappearance of a man whose drive and avidity have been a force to be reckoned with for sixty-eight years marks the conclusion of a gradual fading. This transformation began in the wake of Epstein 's parents ' deaths, and continued with his divorce after more than thirty-five years of marriage, his retirement from a New York legal firm, and the rapid shedding of his possessions. With the last of his wealth and a nebulous plan, he departs for the Tel Aviv Hilton. Meanwhile, a novelist leaves her husband and children behind in Brooklyn and checks into the same hotel, hoping to unlock her writer 's block. But when a man claiming to be a retired professor of literature recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will take her on a metaphysical journey and change her in ways she could never have imagined. Bursting with life and humour, this is a profound, mesmerising, achingly beautiful novel of metamorphosis and self-realisation.
Bloomsbury 2018-08 290 pages

Fieldwork

Berlinski, Mischa
When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead--a suicide--in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Curious at first, Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story. This brilliant, haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life became a battleground for the missionaries and the scientists living among them. "Fieldwork" is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
Atlantic 2008 320 pages

Howl, Kaddish and other poems

Ginsberg, Allen
Allen Ginsberg was the bard of the beat generation, and Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems is a collection of his finest work published in Penguin Modern Classics, including 'Howl', whose vindication at an obscenity trial was a watershed moment in twentieth-century history. 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic 'Howl', which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, 'Kaddish'; the searing indictment of his homeland, 'America'; and the confessional 'Mescaline'. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) was an American poet, best known for the poem 'Howl' (1956), celebrating his friends of the Beat Generation and attacking what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States at the time. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, won the National Book Award for The Fall of America and was a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. If you enjoyed Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems , you might like Jack Kerouac's On the Road , also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The poem that defined a generation' Guardian on 'Howl' 'He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt' William Carlos Williams
Penguin 2009 117 pages

The American

Howard Fast
About the Author In addition to the Immigrants novels, Howard Fast is the author of Greenwich, Being Red, My Glorious Brothers, Time and the Riddle, and Spartacus (the basis for the acclaimed film), among many other books. He has won numerous awards for his writing, including an Emmy Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Schomburg Award for Race Relations. Born in New York in 1914, he now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated 1977 311 pages

My Education A Novel

Susan Choi
An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercise and Flashlight Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife. My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.
Penguin 2014-05-27 304 pages

The list: a novel

Fletcher, Martin
"Winner of a Jewish National Book Award for his previous book, Walking Israel, NBC Special Correspondent Martin Fletcher uses meticulous research and his own family's history in this stunning novel. Dramatizing explosive events in London and Palestine in the years directly following World War II, The List follows the lives of Edith and Georg, Austrian refugees who are expecting their first baby in a world unfriendly to Jews. Anti-Semitism sweeps across the streets of London even as the world learns of the atrocities of the Holocaust. As Edith and Georg desperately search for surviving family members, they struggle to stay afloat in a world riddled with terrorism, assassination attempts, and fear"--
Thomas Dunne 2011-10-11 338 pages

Intuition

Allegra Goodman
Hailed as a writer of uncommon clarity by the New Yorker, National Book Award finalist Allegra Goodman has dazzled readers with her acclaimed works of fiction, including such beloved bestsellers as The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls. Now she returns with a bracing new novel, at once an intricate mystery and a rich human drama set in the high-stakes atmosphere of a prestigious research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sandy Glass, a charismatic publicity-seeking oncologist, and Marion Mendelssohn, a pure, exacting scientist, are codirectors of a lab at the Philpott Institute dedicated to cancer research and desperately in need of a grant. Both mentors and supervisors of their young postdoctoral proteges, Glass and Mendelssohn demand dedication and obedience in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, a young postdoc in a rut, begin to work, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectations. But Cliff's rigorous colleague-and girlfriend-Robin Decker suspects the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it. With extraordinary insight, Allegra Goodman brilliantly explores the intricate mixture of workplace intrigue, scientific ardor, and the moral consequences of a rush to judgment. She has written an unforgettable novel.
Wheeler Pub. 2006 623 pages

36 arguments for the existence of God: a work of fiction

Goldstein, Rebecca
Equally adept at fiction (a winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and philosophy (a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius prize), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein now gives us a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind. At the center: Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. He's been dubbed the atheist with a soul, and his sudden celebrity has upended his life. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum-the goddess of game theory-and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. But he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. The rush of events in a single dramatic week plays out Cass's conviction that the religious impulse spills out into life at large. In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, it is a luminous and intoxicating novel.
Pantheon Books 2010 402 pages

The End of the Point LP

Elizabeth Graver
Longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction Ashaunt Point, Massachusetts, has anchored life for generations of the Porter family, who summer along its remote, rocky shore. But in 1942, the U.S. Army arrives on the Point, bringing havoc and change. That summer, the two older Porter girls—teenagers Helen and Dossie—run wild while their only brother, Charlie, goes off to train for war. The children’s Scottish nurse, Bea, falls in love. And youngest daughter Janie is entangled in an incident that cuts the season short. An unforgettable portrait of one family’s journey through the second half of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Graver’s The End of the Point artfully probes the hairline fractures hidden beneath the surface of our lives and traces the fragile and enduring bonds that connect us.
HarperCollins 2013-03-05 528 pages

Wild Turkey

Roger L. Simon
“Moses Wine is a force to reckon with and to read with pleasure.” —Dick Lochte, Los Angeles Times Book Review “Wine is the latest in an unbroken line of popular private eyes–molded by Dashiell Hammett in the ‘20s, psychoanalyzed by Ross Macdonald in the ‘50s and ‘60s and now dragged kicking and screaming into a new decade’s cultural crunch.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review With an introduction by Roger L. Simon Moses Wine solved his first major case in The Big Fix, and with it has come a certain amount of celebrity: articles about him and interviews with him have appeared in Newsweek. Dr. Gunther Thomas shows up at Moses front door with a challenge to clear best-selling author Jock Hecht of the murder of ABC anchorwoman Deborah Frank. Waist-deep in questions that seem to have no answers, Moses must find a way to solve the unsolvable or being portrayed as a jerk in a national magazine. Ever restless, ROGER L. SIMON has spent his life moving between books and movies, gaining distinction in both. In books, he is best known for the seven Moses Wine detective novels, which have won prizes in the U.S. and Great Britain and been published in over a dozen languages. In film, most prominent among his six produced screenplays—including his adaptation of The Big Fix—is Enemies, A Love Story, for which Simon was nominated for an Academy Award.
ibooks 2011-07-01 172 pages

The War Reporter A Novel

Martin Fletcher
Winner of a Jewish National Book Award and author of The List and Jacob's Oath , both of which achieved outstanding critical acclaim, NBC Special Correspondent Martin Fletcher delivers another breathtaking tale of love, war, and redemption. Tom Layne was a world-class television correspondent until his life collapsed in Sarajevo. Beaten and humiliated, he fell into a hole diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Eleven years later he returns to the Balkans to film a documentary on the man who caused his downfall: Ratko Mladic, Europe’s biggest killer since Hitler, wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. Mysterious forces have protected Mladic for a decade, preventing his arrest, and these shadowy but deadly foes swing into action against the journalist. Tom soon falls into a web of intrigue and deceit that threatens his life as well as that of the woman he loves. Drawing upon his own experiences reporting on the wars in Bosnia and Sarajevo, Martin Fletcher has written a searing love story and a painfully authentic account of a war reporter chasing down the scoop of a lifetime.
St. Martin's Publishing Group 2016-11-08 320 pages