Award-Winning Readings: National Book Award Nominees and winner in Fiction

Helen Phillips is the author of five books, including the collections Some Possible Solutions ( a 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award winner) And Yet They Were Happy, and the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat. She is also the author of the children's adventure novel Here Where The Sunbeams Are Green. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. In her novel The Need (Simon & Schuster), nominated for a national Book Award in Fiction, Helen Phillips has created a subversive, speculative thriller that comes to life through blazing, arresting prose and haunting imagery. Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room and tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement. Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty. She must confront the dualities of motherhood — the ecstasy and the dread; the languor and the ferocity; the banality and the transcendence — as the book hurtles toward a mind-bending conclusion. The Need is a celebration of the bizarre and beautiful nature of our everyday lives. People noted that “If the challenges of parenting young children have ever driven you to the brink, you’ll recognize what’s happening to Molly Nye—for about 10 pages. This fever dream of a novel starts like a thriller (someone’s in the living room), morphs into speculative sci-fi (the intruder is from a separate universe) and ends up like nothing you’ve ever read before. In a good way.”

Julia Phillips’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Moscow Times. She studied Russian at Barnard and secured a Fulbright scholarship to visit Russia. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of Kamchatka, a peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls--sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks and months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Julia Phillips’s debut novel Disappearing Earth (Knopf) takes us through a year in Kamchatka, visiting in the process the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty--densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and glassy seas. But this is a region as complex as it is alluring, a place where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered. Disappearing Earth reveals the intricate bonds of family and community in a Russia we have not seen before. The New York Times Book Review called Disappearing Earth “A superb debut—brilliant. Daring, nearly flawless. […] Phillips describes the region with a cartographer’s precision and an ethnographer’s clarity, drawing an emblematic cast . . . There will be those eager to designate Disappearing Earth a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it.”

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is from Denver, Colorado. Her fiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Idaho Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Fajardo-Anstine has received fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. She received her MFA from the University of Wyoming. She is the author of Sabrina & Corina: Stories (One World), finalist for a National Book Award in Fiction, a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands, a finalist for a National Book Award in fiction. Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force. Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home. Joy Williams calls it, “A terrific collection of stories—fiercely and beautifully made.”

Kimberly King Parsons received her MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among others. Black Light: Stories (Vintage) is her first book. Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties writes, “The stories in Black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush…I loved every moment of this book.” With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise.

Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits; Secret Son; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her novel, The Other Americans (Pantheon Books) was a finalist for the National Book Awards in Fiction. Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui’s daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she’d left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora’s and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son’s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. As the characters—deeply divided by race, religion, and class—tell their stories, connections among them emerge, even as Driss’s family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love, messy and unpredictable, is born.

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It also won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead Books), a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

Susan Choi’s is the author of five novels, including, The Foreign Student, which won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, American Woman, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, A Person of Interest, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and My Education, which received a 2014 Lammy Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale. Entertainment Weekly calls her latest book, Trust Exercise: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co.), “a gonzo literary performance.” In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble. Also from Susan Choi, a tiger shows up on a family camping trip in the woods in the children’s book, Camp Tiger (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers).