Bay City News
The long list for the 2024 Booker Prize, considered one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, has been announced, and six of 13 novelists on it are Americans, including two with strong Bay Area connections.
Oakland born and bred Tommy Orange, the Cheyenne and Arapaho author who impressed the literary world with his debut novel "There There" in 2018 is nominated for his follow-up work, "Wandering Stars" (Knopf). Continuing to explore the complexities of Native American heritage, Orange has set the work in modern Oakland and in Colorado in the 1860s, where a hapless boy is forced into a Christian school after surviving the infamous Sand Creek Massacre.
Second-time nominee Rachel Kushner, who lives in Los Angeles now, grew up in the Sunset District of San Francisco and worked as a young woman at the Fillmore and the Great American Music Hall and several Bay Area bars. A finalist for her 2018 novel "The Mars Room," she is on this year's list for "Creation Lake" (Simon & Schuster), a brainy thriller about an American woman sent to a remote corner of France to spy on a cadre of eco-terrorists led by a charismatic guy who advocates a return to Neanderthal-like primitivism.
The other American nominees include Percival Everett, an English professor at the University of Southern California, whose novel "James" (Doubleday) turns Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn story upside down by telling it, with great humor, from the perspective of the escaped slave who rafts down the Mississippi with the errant teenager.
Prolific American novelist Richard Powers, nominated in 2014 for "Orfeo" and again in 2018 for his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Overstory" and a third time in 2021 for "Bewilderment," may make the fourth time the charm with "Playground" (W.W. Norton). It revolves around four disparate characters who come together on an island in French Polynesia, where there is a plan to colonize the ocean with human "seasteaders."
Novelist Claire Messud, who is on the English faculty at Harvard and was nominated for "The Emperor's Children in 2006, is on the long list this year for "This Strange Eventful History" (W.W. Norton), which follows the peregrinations of a French Algerian family for seven decades beginning in 1940.
Rita Bullwinkel, the last American on the list, is an accomplished short story writer nominated for her debut novel "Headshot" (Viking), which follows four teenage girls who come to Reno, Nevada, to compete in a boxing tournament that will declare one of them the best in America.
The seven other semifinalists are Colin Barrett for "Wild Houses," Samantha Harvey for "Orbital," Hisham Matar for "My Friends," Anne Michaels for "Held," Yael van Der Wouden for "The Safe Keep," Sarah Perry for "Enlightenment" and Charlotte Wood for "Stone Yard Devotional." You can find more information about them and their novels and read generous excerpts from all 13 contenders at thebookerprizes.com. Founded in 1969 and carrying the lucrative prize of $64,000, the Booker is open to writers from any country who write in English and are published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The long list will be winnowed to six finalists, announced on Sept. 16, with first prize announced at a London ceremony on Nov. 12.
In the pipeline: Coming Sept. 10 from Bay Area author and journalist Alison Owings is a clear-eyed account of one man's two-decade-long transition from homeless criminal and drug addict to quintessential upstanding citizen fully deserving of the description "pillar of his community."
That the community in question is one of San Francisco's most trouble-plagued makes "The Mayor of the Tenderloin" (Beacon Press, $28.95, 272 pages) all that more compelling a read. Owings' subject is Del Seymour, a tireless advocate who, after finally achieving sobriety, started leading walking tours of the neighborhood and co-founded Code Tenderloin, a remarkable nonprofit that fights homelessness by teaching marginalized people how to prepare for and keep meaningful jobs.
Owings, who spent more than a decade following Seymour and interviewing both those whose lives he transformed and those social workers and city officials he impressed with his success, has thrown herself into deep research before.
She is the author of three previous nonfiction works that required it, 2002's "Hey, Waitress! The USA From the Other Side of the Tray," 1993's "Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich" and 2011's "Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans."
Owings, a Mill Valley resident, has an impressive number of appearances lined up, beginning with the 6 p.m. Sept. 12 launch party at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Others include: 7 p.m. Sept. 17 at Books, Inc. in Palo Alto; 7 p.m. Sept. 18 at Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco; 5:30 p.m. Sept. 19 at the Tenderloin Museum, 398 Eddy St., San Francisco; 3 p.m. Sept. 22 at Marcus Books in Oakland; 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Sept. 29 at San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church, where she and Seymour will be leading morning services; 6 p.m. Oct. 2 at Sausalito Books by the Bay; 9:30 a.m. Oct. 6 at a Universalist Unitarian Sunday Forum at 1187 Franklin St., San Francisco; 2 p.m. Oct. 13 at a Litquake event with Skywatchers at the KALW Studios, 220 Montgomery St. in San Francisco and 11:30 a.m. Oct. 20 at an Adult Ed Forum at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco.
The literati get political: As she did before in a previous election cycle, South Bay author Meg Waite Clayton has launched an online campaign urging authors to post their political leanings. This year, many of her BookTheVote participants are publishing pictures of themselves hoisting placards that proudly pronounce "I'm with Kamala!"
When I first learned of the effort in early August, I checked bookthevote.org and found a couple of dozen names listed, with many authors I recognized and have read, such as: George Saunders, Amy Tan, Karen Joy Fowler, Nicola Kraus, Ann Patchett and Luis Alberto Urrea. Checking back again a mere week later, I was impressed to see the list ballooned to 182 names, and I'm hazarding a guess there will be more by the time you readers check it!
Censuring the censors: National banned book week is coming up Sept. 22-28, and as it does every year, the American Library Association has released the list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023.
The ALA noted an alarming increase in the number of books targeted for censorship across the country, documenting 4,240 individual titles, 65 percent higher than 2022's totals. Amazingly enough, Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" is still on the list, at No. 6, cited for sexually explicit content.
The others, in descending order of the number of protests raised, are Maia Kobabe's "Gender Queer," George M. Johnson's "All Boys Aren't Blue," Juno Dawson's "This Book Is Gay," Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," Mike Curato's "Flamer," Jesse Andrews' "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," tied at 56 challenges with Ellen Hopkins' "Tricks," Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan's "Let's Talk About It" and Patricia McCormick's "Sold."
Read more about attempts to remove books from the nation's libraries at ala.org, where you will also find a button for contributing to its Office of Intellectual Freedom. Or you can get your money directly to the effort to get banned books into the hands of young readers by donating to Foundation451.org, a nonprofit launched a couple of years ago in that hotbed of censorship, Florida, by a teacher and activist named Adam Tritt, who more recently has also launched a GoFundMe effort.
His organization's title is, of course, a sly reference to Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel about book burning from 1953, "Fahrenheit 451."
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can't-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
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