Winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, addressing racism and diversity, have been announced

 

Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” wins the fiction prize of the Anisfield-Wolf Awards.

Winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, addressing racism and diversity, have been announced

BY MICHAEL SCHAUB
APRIL 3, 2018 10:15 AM PT

The winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which honor outstanding books that address racism and diversity, will go this year to authors Jesmyn Ward, Kevin Young, N. Scott Momaday and Shane McCrae. Each will be awarded a prize of $10,000.

 

Jade Sharma

Twitter Reacts to the Death of Author Jade Sharma at 39

September4, 2019

Jade Sharma, whose 2016 debut novel, Problems, drew praise from critics and fellow authors, has died at 39.

Her death was reported by Catapult, where she worked as a writing instructor. Ruth Curry, who edited Problems, said that Sharma died on July 24.

Maaza Mengiste / The Shadow King' Is A Gorgeous Meditation On Memory, War And Violence

Maaza Mengiste

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The Shadow King' Is A Gorgeous Meditation On Memory, War And Violence

September 25, 20197:00 AM ET

MICHAEL SCHAUB

The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

Hardcover, 428 pages

Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King opens with a woman, Hirut, sitting on the floor of a train station in the Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa, holding an old metal box. She's traveled here, the reader is told, "to rid herself of the horror that staggers back unbidden. She has come to give up the ghosts and drive them away." She's awaiting the box's owner, an Italian photographer she hasn't seen in decades. "It has taken so long to get here," Mengiste writes. "It has taken almost forty years of another life to begin to remember who she had once been."

The importance of memory — of those that came before us, and of things we'd rather forget — is at the heart of The Shadow King, the second novel from Ethiopian American author Mengiste. It's a sprawling, unforgettable epic from an immensely talented author who's unafraid to take risks.

Richard Lloyd Parry / 'Ghosts Of The Tsunami' Examines The Disaster That Haunts Japan

'Ghosts Of The Tsunami' Examines 

The Disaster That Haunts Japan

Top 10 ghost stories

Michael Schaub
October 26, 2017
MICHAEL SCHAUB

It's easy to send thoughts and prayers and move on if you're not among those whose lives were altered by the storms. But natural disasters continue to destroy lives long after the damage is done. In his new book Ghosts of the Tsunami, author Richard Lloyd Parry considers the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami, which took thousands of lives, and which haunts its survivors to this day. It's a wrenching chronicle of a disaster that, six years later, still seems incomprehensible.