James, Lalami among National Book Award nominees

Michelle Obama’s next project a companion to ‘Becoming’

NEW YORK, Oct 9, (AP): Marlon James fantasy novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” Laila Lalami’s immigrant tale “The Other Americans” and Jason Reynolds’ neighborhood story “Look Both Ways” are among this year’s finalists for the 70th annual National Book Awards.

Nominees announced Tuesday also include Albert Woodfox, the former prison inmate who spent more than 40 years in solitary confinement in the Louisiana State Penitentiary before his murder conviction was overturned and he was released, in 2016. His memoir “Solitary,” written with Leslie George, is a finalist for nonfiction.

Five nominees were announced in each of five categories, ranging from fiction to translation to young people’s literature. None of the finalists has ever won a competitive National Book Award and only four have received any kind of recognition, including poetry nominee Toi Derricotte, a recipient of an honorary National Book Award in 2016 for cofounding the poetry center Cave Canem.

This year’s winners will be announced Nov. 20 at a benefit dinner in New York City, with LeVar Burton serving as host and honorary prizes going to author Edmund White and to Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association. The awards are presented by the National Book Foundation. Winners in the competitive categories each receive $10,000.

James and Lalami were chosen for fiction, along with Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise,” Kali FajardoAnstine’s “Sabrina & Corina” and Julia Phillips’ “Disappearing Earth.” In nonfiction, nominees besides Woodfox were Sarah M. Broom’s “The Yellow House,” Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick: And Other Essays,” Carolyn Forché’s “What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” and David Treuer’s “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.”

The translation nominees were Khaled Khalifa’s “Death Is Hard Work” (translated from the Arabic by Leri Price), László Krasznahorkai’s “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” (translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet), Scholastique Mukasonga’s “The Barefoot Woman” (translated from the French by Jordan Stump), Yoko Ogawa’s “The Memory Police” (translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder) and Pajtim Statovci’s “Crossing” (translated from the Finnish by David Hackston).

In poetry, finalists besides Derricotte’s “I: New and Selected Poems” were Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition,” Ilya Kaminsky’s “Deaf Republic,” Carmen Giménez Smith’s “Be Recorder” and Arthur Sze’s “Sight Lines.” Nominees besides Reynolds in young people’s literature were Akwaeke Emezi’s “Pet,” Randy Ribay’s “Patron Saints of Nothing,” Laura Ruby’s “Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All” and Martin W. Sandler’s “1919 The Year That Changed America.”

Ten of the 25 nominated books, including four out of five in fiction, were released by Penguin Random House, the country’s largest publisher. Another 10 came from university and independent presses. The finalists were voted on by judging panels of authors, critics and others in the literary community. Publishers submitted about her readers than about herself.

“Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice” will be published Nov. 19 by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The new release was announced Monday. It is a companion to her multimillion-selling “Becoming,” which came out last November. It features an introduction by the former first lady and quotations and questions related to her memoir. It is designed to help readers tell their own stories.

In the introduction, Obama writes that she hopes the journal will encourage people to write down their “experiences, thoughts, and feelings, in all their imperfections, and without judgment.”

NEW YORK:

A book of Toni Morrison quotations is coming out in December.

“The Measure of Our Lives: A Gathering of Wisdom” will draw from her whole body of work, including celebrated novels such as “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon.”

The foreword is by Zadie Smith, adapted from a tribute she wrote soon after the Nobel laureate died in August at age 88.

A publisher’s note describes the book as a distillation of her major themes, including “transcendence through imagination; the self and its discontents; the vicissitudes of love; the whirligig of memory; the singular power of women; the original American sin of slavery; the bankruptcy of racial oppression; the complex humanity; and art of black people.”

The compact, 128-page compilation was put together by Erroll McDonald, executive editor and vice president of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. He told The Associated Press on Monday that he thought of the book as a response to the “tremendous adulation” that Morrison received after her death. He intends “The Measure of Our Lives” to serve as an introduction for new readers and an “ideal keepsake” for longtime admirers.

The book’s title comes from one of Morrison’s most famous sayings, about words themselves: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”