The National Book Foundation’s new digital outreach series features a 12-event presentation of winners, shortlistees, and finalists, including international literature and translation.
In the main hall at Union Station in Washington, DC, during the holidays. Image – iStockphoto: Xackery Irving
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The National Book Foundation which produces the annual National Book Awards in November is a year-round operation with educational outreach programming made possible by a multi-year US$900,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
All announced programming for this season running through June in the ongoing coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic will be held, of course, exclusively online, at no cost to viewers. Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, DC, is to again be the program’s bookseller.
Natasha Gilmore, Idlewild Books and Open Borders Books, NYC
: This book contains two novellas and some short stories set around Colombia (and occasionally Miami). The narration is often low-affect, sharply cynical, and wryly observed. There’s a cutting honesty in the voice throughout the book that feels totally absent from so much literature now. It reminded me of the feeling of encountering something truly when I was a teenager. But then there’s just the crushing reality of coming into sexuality as a teen, colorism and racism in Colombia, the restlessness wrought by capitalism and the desire to flee yourself and the accidents of your birth that ultimately coalesce into something so universally resonant, that will make any reader feel seen and connected. Truly an author worthy of attention.