And a loud and joyful “Congratulations” to Margaret Atwood, who was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague earlier this week!
The Franz Kafka Society has presented its prize annually 2001 to “contemporary authors whose literary works are exceptional in terms of artistic quality and can appeal to readers irrespective of their origin, nationality and culture, similar to the works by Kafka (1883-1924).” Past winners of the Czech Republic’s only literary award include American Philip Roth, Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Elfriede Jelinek, British playwright Harold Pinter and this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner Haruki Murakami.
Though most people currently know Atwood as the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was made into an award-winning mini-series this year, she is also the author of more than 40 books across forms and genres. Her novel Alias Grace will be released on Netflix starting November 3rd.
In accepting the award, Atwood noted that Kafka, the Prague-born Jewish-German writer whose writing revolutionized the world of fiction, was her first literary love. And since Margaret Atwood was so many of our first literary loves here at the Library, we all take enormous pride in wishing her heaps of congratulations!
And now, on to some of the books that have tumbled down like leaves onto our shelves this week….
We Were Eight Years In Power: “We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.” But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president. This is a book for anyone who was touched or educated or inspired by Coates’ previous work, as well as for those who have not yet encountered his powerful insights and gentle way of educating. This book has been winning acclaim across the country, in addition to earning a starred review from Kirkus, who celebrated it “Biting cultural and political analysis from the award-winning journalist . . . He contextualizes each piece with candid personal revelations, making the volume a melding of memoir and critique. . . . Emotionally charged, deftly crafted, and urgently relevant.”
The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age: The internet is a place where we live, though it’s not a place we can physically inhabit. It has changed our lives, without being a physical presence. And in these three essays, writer Andrew O’Hagan explores those porous borders between cyberspace and real life…from a consideration of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to how a dead man’s name was used to create a whole new life on the internet, O’Hagan’s searching pieces take us to the weirder fringes of life in a digital world while also casting light on our shared predicaments. What does it mean when your very sense of self becomes, to borrow a term from the tech world, “disrupted”? This book is also being cheered as one of the best of the year, and earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly who hailed it as “Splendid . . . O’Hagan’s grasp of storytelling is prodigious…Taken as a whole, this is an unmissable collection of up-to-the-moment insights about life in our digital era.”
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: An ambitious title if there ever was one! In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, …but those stories were always largely inaccessible, until recent scientific pioneering has led us to understand the smallest parts of our makeup. In this fascinating and insightful work, Adam Rutherford explores how geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story—from 100,000 years ago to the present. This is a book filled with provocative questions that we’re on the cusp of answering: Are we still in the grasp of natural selection? Are we evolving for better or worse? And . . . where do we go from here? Renowned science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote a forward for this book, as well as providing a stellar blurb, which hails this book as “Ambitious, wide-ranging, and deeply researched, Rutherford’s book sets out to describe the history of the human species—from our origins as a slight, sly, naked, apelike creature somewhere in Africa to our gradual spread across the globe and our dominion over the planet.”
Rebellion: Molly Patterson’s stellar debut crosses time and geography to tell a powerful story about four women whose rebellions, both large and small, change their worlds. At the heart of the novel lies a mystery: In 1900, Addie, an American missionary in China, goes missing during the Boxer Rebellion, leaving her family back home to wonder at her fate. Her sister Louisa—newly married and settled in rural Illinois—anticipates tragedy, certain that Addie’s fate is intertwined with her own legacy of loss. In 1958, Louisa’s daughter Hazel has her world upended by the untimely death of her husband. Nearly half a century later, Juanlan has returned to her parents’ home in Heng’an. With her father ill, her sister-in-law soon to give birth, and the construction of a new highway rapidly changing the town she once knew, she feels pressured on every side by powers outside her control. This is a work being celebrated by writers and critics alike, with Booklist calling it “[A] remarkable debut… This is a book about the quiet unfolding of lives and the kind of rebellion that comes from following one’s heart.”
Here in Berlin: Cristina Garcia is a fascinating and insightful novelist whose work is utterly transporting. This newest release brings us to the heart of Germany during the Second World War, delivering haunting scenes of survival, hope, and heartbreak.
An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character―vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people’s history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace. This book also earned a starred review from Booklist, which said in its review “García, a transcendentally imaginative, piquantly satiric, and profoundly compassionate novelist, dramatizes the helter-skelter of lives ruptured by tyranny, war, and political upheavals with sharp awareness of unlikely multicultural alliances . . . García has created an intricate, sensitive, and provocative montage revolving around the question: ‘Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?'”