Lifestyle
One of these novelists will receive the $150K Carol Shields Prize
Here’s the shortlist of authors for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. The winner will be announced in Toronto on May 13th.
McClelland & Stewart/Random House/Doubleday Canada/SJP Lit
hide caption
toggle caption
McClelland & Stewart/Random House/Doubleday Canada/SJP Lit
Here’s the shortlist of authors for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. The winner will be announced in Toronto on May 13th.
McClelland & Stewart/Random House/Doubleday Canada/SJP Lit
The Carol Shields Prize is a newcomer in the world of literary awards. It’s also one of the most generous. The winner will receive $150,000 and a residency with Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, Canada. Each of the four runner-ups will receive $12,500.
The winner of the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, the second annual award, will be announced on May 13. Here’s shortlist:
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
In this eco-thriller, a guerilla gardening collective named ‘Birnam Wood’ (after Macbeth) meets an American billionaire. In his review for WHYY’s Fresh Air, John Powers writes, “this New Zealand-set book is a witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth.”
Daughter by Claudia Dey
Protagonist Mona Dean is a playwright, actor and daughter of an insecure man who is famous for one great novel. The Carol Shields Prize describes Daughter as “exposing painful truths about art, family, and systemic inequities” and “a study of intimate manipulations and the trope of the male genius.”
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote
Foote’s debut novel is partly based on her own family history. In the early 1900s, two Black women quit the Jim Crow south and head for New Jersey. “Gripping, poetic, and with a big heart,” writes Publishers Weekly, “it’s a memorable work of grim determination and surprising optimism.”
A History of Burning by Janika Oza
Oza’s historical fiction draws from President Idi Amin’s forced expulsion of more than 50,000 South Asians from Uganda in 1972. Her debut novel follows four generations of one family over continents and the course of nearly a century. “An ambitious family drama skillfully explores the bonds of kinship and the yearning for peace and security,” writes Kirkus Reviews.
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
“What makes a person become a terrorist?” writes Emiko Tamagawa, senior producer of Here & Now. “This book explores that question through the eyes of Sashi, a young Tamil woman growing up in a Sri Lanka on the edge of civil war. I was completely engrossed in this novel; reading it made the story of the Tamil Tigers and the bloody conflict in Sri Lanka real to me in a way they hadn’t been before.”
Celebrating women and non-binary writers
The winner of the second Carol Shields Prize will be announced on May 13 during a live event in Toronto hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, writer, and Carol Shields Prize Foundation board director Natasha Trethewey.
Named for Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Carol Shields, the award recognizes “creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States” according to its website. Shields, who died in 2003 at the age of 68, was best known for The Stone Diaries.
The first recipient of the prize was Fatimah Asghar for their debut novel When We Were Sisters.
This story was edited by Meghan Sullivan.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Focus Features
hide caption
toggle caption
Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:
Letterboxd / Facebook
Our weekly newsletter
Support Pop Culture Happy Hour+
I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
-
Los Angeles, Ca17 minutes agoBicyclist killed by hit-and-run driver in Long Beach
-
Detroit, MI35 minutes agoChild shot while riding bike outside home on Detroit’s west side, police say
-
San Francisco, CA47 minutes agoBay Area restaurant has strict policy on acceptable children behavior
-
Dallas, TX50 minutes agoDetroit Pistons trade Marcus Sasser to Dusty May’s Dallas Mavericks
-
Miami, FL55 minutes agoThe offseason has been a massive success for the Miami Heat
-
Boston, MA1 hour agoCan’t afford Boston’s priciest restaurants? Try these instead. – The Boston Globe
-
Denver, CO1 hour agoCity of Denver says images of piling waste a case of illegal dumping
-
Seattle, WA1 hour ago14-year-old dies in electric motorcycle crash at Seattle bike park
