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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the biggest headlines from last week.
And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes To…
Laszlo Krasznahorkai. “Who?” you ask. Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian writer known for writing dark, apocalyptic novels in a style that features, for instance, only one period and long run-on sentences. He’s a winner of the Man Booker International Prize and Susan Sontag called him a “master of the apocalypse.” His most recent novel translated to English is Herscht 07769. As the New York Times announcement points out, the Nobel in Literature doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to awarding the prize to writers who aren’t white men, and I’m hard pressed to feel anything about this year’s winner. Maybe it’s because I’ve never read Krasznahorkai and have bad memories of slogging through the run-on novel that is Ulysses (also critically acclaimed) and feel no inclination whatsoever to read hyper-stylized novels, but this news is feeling very “Go girl give us nothing.”
What Books Do Readers Find Most Confusing?
Are there certain books that confuse readers more than others? The answer is, unsurprisingly, yes. But what books are the most confusing to the general reader audience? That’s what the book lovers at Aura Print sought to find out in a recent survey.
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The National Book Awards Finalists are Here
And we have our National Book Awards finalists! The National Book Foundation announced the shortlist yesterday and boy was I surprised to discover that Han Kang’s We Do Not Part fell off the Translated Literature list. I was also pretty confident Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness would make the Fiction cut. Still, I was jazzed to see One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad make it through in Nonfiction, as well as some of my anticipated reads in Fiction, like The Antidote by Karen Russell, which I’m planning to pick up after I read The Wilderness, and Palaver by Bryan Washington, which isn’t out yet. It’s been fascinating to watch the awards lists roll in and clock which books make some lists but not others, and which books get all the critical acclaim, making multiple lists. Anticipate an analysis once awards season winds down! In the meantime, you can find the full list of NBA finalists here and the winners will be announced November 19th.
The Kirkus Prize Winners
I have been overwhelmed by awards season announcements and almost missed out on the Kirkus Prize winners. The Kirkus Prize awards a whopping $50,000 to authors of outstanding, Kirkus-starred works in the categories of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. This year’s winners are: The Slip by Lucas Schaefer (Fiction), King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Nonfiction), Everybelly by Thao Lam (Young Readers’ Literature). The Slip is a chunky debut novel exploring “issues of race, class, sex, and gender through a wildly inventive group of characters and events,” King of Kings dives into a meaty topic that remains relevant today, and my belly-obsessed toddlers can expect to find Lam’s delightful picture book celebrating different body sizes and shapes underneath the Christmas tree this year.
Tommy Orange is a 2025 MacArthur Fellow
Tommy Orange, you genius, you. The author of the highly-praised and widely-read novels There, There and, most recently, Wandering Stars is one of this year’s 22 MacArthur Fellows, commonly known as the “Genius Grant.” This means he’ll receive an $800,000, no-strings-attached award serving as “an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.” Fellows are chosen based on three criteria: exceptional creativity; promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments which could be enabled by the Foundation’s support; and, potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Jeff and I discussed Orange’s win for an upcoming Book Riot pod episode, including how he still feels like a relatively fresh writer. That makes sense for this award, which sets out to cultivate impactful talent, and boy has he made an impact in short time. What a deserved win.
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