This week's TBR is focused on bringing some recognizable names to your reading list. Included are five new releases written by all different celebrities, click to read more!
Tag: memoir
2020 National Book Awards Finalists
This year's twenty five National Book Awards finalists sport titles which feature diverse stories and narratives.
Why Every LGBTQIA+ Person Deserves Their Book
I didn’t know that gay books existed until I was eighteen years old. I’d also barely said the word “gay” out loud until then either. LGBTQ+ people of all ages deserve to be represented in literature and literary studies.
National Book Award Nominees of 2020
The National Book Awards has released the names of its 2020 nominees, including two acclaimed debut novelists: Megha Majumdar and Douglas Stuart, both their fiction novels taking on serious cultural themes.
Majumdar’s A Burning is about a Muslim girl trying to make it out of the slums and is accused of being linked to a terrorist attack on a train, and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain tells of the childhood of a young boy in 1980’s Scotland, growing up in the throws of poverty and drugs.
Other novelists included on this list include Rumaan Alam for his work Leave the World Behind, and Brit Bennett for the novel that swiftly rose to popularity, The Vanishing Half.
Among the non-fiction authors nominated are Isabel Wilkerson for Caste, Jill Lepore for If Then, Claudio Saunt for Unworthy Republic and Frank B. Wilderson III for Afropessimism, a philosophical memoir and essay about how the Black experience is seen through the lens of slavery. The text Undocumented Americans also brought Karla Cornejo Villavicencio to the list with her honest memoir paired with extensive research into immigration.
The two short story collection nominees include the recently departed, Randall Kenan, for her collection If I Had Wings, and Deesha Philyaw for The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
The finalists of this list will be revealed on October 6th, and the winners will be announced via a virtual ceremony on November 18th.
FEATURE IMAGE VIA LITERARY HUB
Barack Obama’s Memoir Is Out Nov.17
Two weeks after this coming election day, the first volume of Barack Obama’s memoir will be out for the public to get their hands on. The book is called A Promised Land and will detail his time as president during his first term into his presidency.
“I’ve spent the last few years reflecting on my presidency, and in ‘A Promised Land’ I’ve tried to provide an honest accounting of my presidential campaign and my time in office: the key events and people who shaped it; my take on what I got right and the mistakes I made; and the political, economic, and cultural forces that my team and I had to confront then — and that as a nation we are grappling with still.”
The memoir will give the reader a glimpse of the personal journey that he and his wife, Michelle Obama, went through while in their stations as President and First Lady respectively. The book will be distributed by a division of Penguin Random House and a second volume hasn’t been determine as of yet.
