The National Book Awards published by the National Book Foundation celebrates the best in American Literature. The awards aim to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America and increase its audience.
Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
Author: Roz Chast
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (May 6, 2014)
ISBN: 1608198065, 978-1608198061
Genre: Biographies and Memoirs
Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast’s memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.
No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes
Author: Anand Gopal
Publisher: Metropolitan Books (April 29, 2014)
ISBN-10: 0805091793, 978-0805091793
Genre: History, Politics and Government
In a breathtaking chronicle, acclaimed journalist Anand Gopal traces in vivid detail the lives of three Afghans caught in America’s war on terror. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from scrawny teenager to leading insurgent; a US-backed warlord, who uses the American military to gain personal wealth and power; and a village housewife trapped between the two sides, who discovers the devastating cost of neutrality.
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Author: John Lahr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 22, 2014)
ISBN-10: 0393021246, 978-0393021240
Genre: Biogrpahies and Memoirs
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation’s sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams’s warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Author: Evan osnos
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; F First Edition edition (May 13, 2014)
ISBN-10: 0374280746, 978-0374280741
Genre: Politics and Government
Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail.
The Meaning of Human Existence
Author: Edward O. Wilsom
Publisher: Liveright; 1 edition (October 6, 2014)
ISBN-10: 0871401002, 978-0871401007
Genre: History and Philosophy
Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet’s sonnet is wholly different from the spider’s web. Whether attempting to explicate “The Riddle of the Human Species,” “Free Will,” or “Religion”; warning of “The Collapse of Biodiversity”; or even creating a plausible “Portrait of E.T.,” Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe.
* Book descriptions are used from Amazon.com