Monthly Archives: November 2024

The Party Goes Late at the 75th National Book Awards

Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

As I wait on line to enter Cipriani Wall Street, I have a goal in mind: Find out what Miranda July is wearing. July, whose second novel, All Fours, came out in the spring, is one of five authors nominated for a National Book Award for fiction this year; she’s also a Prada collaborator and will presumably show up stylishly. The dress code tonight is formal, and guests at the National Book Foundation’s 75th awards ceremony have mostly complied, wearing tuxedos, ball gowns, and lots of sequins. For book people, though, black tie includes canvas tote bags.

In 2023, the lead-up to the National Book Awards was fraught. Ahead of the event, rumors circulated about finalists planning a “disruption” to protest the war in Gaza; in pre-response, Zibby Media and Book of the Month both pulled out as sponsors. The actual gesture, a measured statement calling for a cease-fire given onstage by a group of 18 nominees and winners, was far from controversial and hardly disruptive.

This year, despite an impending second Trump administration and a rash of book bans, the mood is looser. That’s reflected in the nominated books, too: Fiction front-runners James, by Percival Everett; July’s All Fours; and Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar, are deeply funny as well as brilliant. It’s all to a purpose: to unsettle, maybe, or stir something up in the reader by making them laugh. “I don’t know if it’s humor so much in James — it’s irony. We need irony right now,” Everett tells me later in the night.

Inside what used to be the National City Bank Building, people are milling around under the 60-foot Greek Revival ceilings. “I’m obsessed with Colored Television,” I hear someone say by the bar. I spot two women standing a few feet apart wearing the same burgundy gown — a Rent the Runway disaster — and overhear a few conversations about who might win the fiction award tonight. It seems like it’s Everett’s prize to lose.

The journalists head over to a set of bleacher seats to gaze onto the nominees eating dinner like visitors at a bookish human zoo. Halfway through the courses, the ceremony begins with a speech by host Kate McKinnon (she’s got jokes: “Books do so many things. They inspire, they transport, they kill spiders when you can’t find a shoe”). The lifetime-achievement awards go to Barbara Kingsolver and W. Paul Coates, who won the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Coates (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s father) has faced criticism since the announcement of the honor in September because his publishing house, Black Classic Press, reissued an antisemitic novel in 2022 called The Jewish Onslaught that was originally published in 1993. Despite that, he, like Kingsolver, receives a standing ovation. “I am not an interpreter. I prefer to let these voices speak to new generations for themselves,” Coates says in his speech. “My mission is recovery.” (The Jewish Onslaught was removed from Black Classic Press’s site not long after the backlash.)

A smaller standing ovation happens when Lena Khalaf Tuffaha wins for her book of poetry Something About Living, published by the University of Akron Press. “We are now living in the second November of the American-funded genocide in Palestine,” Tuffaha, whose father was born in Jerusalem, says. “I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and to make it stop.”

Everyone sits up a little straighter when Lauren Groff, chair of the fiction judges, appears onstage. Along with Akbar, Everett, and July, the Nigerian author ’Pemi Aguda is nominated for Ghostroots, a collection of short stories, as is Hisham Matar for My Friends, his third novel, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction this year. The winner — and this feels right — is Everett, who takes the stage with a small smile on his face. Everett, 67 years old, who’s been publishing novels consistently since 1983, is brief but gracious in his speech, thanking his publishers and his wife, Danzy Senna, along with their two teenage sons, “whose near-complete apathy about my career helps me keep things in perspective.”

During the after-party, I scan the crowd and spot Anne Carson in a sharp gray suit and wide red tie. No sign of July, but every time I see a woman with short, curly hair, I snap to attention. On the balcony upstairs where a DJ is stationed, everyone is doing the Electric Slide. The translator Lin King, who won the award for Translated Literature with Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, tells me she’s “dumbfounded” at the win and a little thirsty: “I’ve been looking for water all night.” She’s having a great time. “I laughed so hard at Miranda July’s reading yesterday,” she says, “and Percival Everett gave me a hug. That was phenomenal.” On his way out the door in a red scarf, under the roar of “Must Be the Money,” Everett tells me “it feels great, of course, to be in conversation with these authors.”

I find the crew from Deep Vellum, a Dallas press that was nominated for its first National Book Award this year for Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The Villain’s Dance. Mujila and Roland Glasser, who’s the book’s translator, and Deep Vellum’s publisher, Will Evans, are in matching bolo ties. New York is like Congo, Mujila says: Unlike Austria, where he lives now, “The city lives all in the night — a lot of things happen at night.”

A wave of younger publishing people, not yet powerful enough to get seats at the table but key for the late-night energy, has filtered in to party. Not long after the ceremony, most of the more distinguished nominees have left for quieter places, and July is nowhere in sight; someone tells me they heard she was wearing “white briefs, which sounds interesting.” But Barbara Kingsolver is still around, holding court on the upstairs balcony in a long-sleeved red sequin dress. I sidle up to her just after she’s kicked off her heels. What’s going through her mind, I ask? “I feel incredibly encouraged by the courage of the authors here tonight,” she says, but she can’t talk long — she’s about to go to the dance floor. When the Sugarhill Gang’s “Jump on It” starts playing, she makes a beeline. “She’s dancing! She’s dancing!” I hear someone squeal to a friend. She’s still out there when “212,” by Azealia Banks, starts up around midnight, and I decide to leave them to it.

‘Wicked’ fans are warning about the book: It’s very different than the musical

It didn’t take long for BookToker Asia Lin to understand that “Wicked,” the book by Gregory Maguire, would be nothing like the musical she had first seen months earlier.“It was the first page,” Lin tells TODAY.com, recalling a scene in which Dorothy and her companions discuss a rumor that Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is intersex. “I was like, ‘Wait. Hold on. This was not in the musical at all.’”Content creator Sara Ribeiro, who grew up listening to “Wicked” in a musical theater-loving family, experienced a visceral shock while reading the book this year.“(The book) ended up being a lot darker than I thought. I would say within the first 10 to 20%, my jaw was on the floor multiple times. I wasn’t expecting it to be so … graphic,” she says.The musical “Wicked” is based on the novel by Gregory Maguire.WalmartWith the first part of “Wicked” debuting in theaters Nov. 22 (and the second and final part coming in 2025), TikTokers like Lin and Ribeiro are discovering the novel and sharing their experiences — from surprise to admiration — in real time. “Why didn’t anyone warn me?” Lin asks in a TikTok, echoing many other fans. Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West”— a revisionist take on L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” — originally published in 1995 and was followed by multiple other books to make a series. “Wicked” the musical made its Broadway debut in 2003. The book and musical could be distilled to the same plot summary: Behold, the unexpected backstory of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda the Good. But the ways the book and musical convey its themes — like injustice, identity and friendship — is what distinguishes the two. “They’re both about a young woman named Elphaba — but very different. The best way I can explain is like when your parents would hide vegetables in your food, and you wouldn’t notice it. That’s kind of what they did with the musical,” Meredith Ammons, a content creator, tells TODAY.com. Whereas the musical hides its political message behind “fluff,” Ammons says, the book “hits you over the head with it.” She continues, “It’s like reading a children’s Bible for the first time versus reading the actual Bible for the first time, and how differently the tones are.”The plight of Animals — conscious animals — takes center stage in the book, as does Elphaba’s activism. Not so much a side character, the Wizard is rather a full-fledged dictatorial force committing massacres on the hinterlands of Oz and amassing power. While political allegory is the B-plot to “Wicked” the musical, which centers on Glinda and Elphaba’s friendship, it’s the main storyline of Maguire’s book. Maguire’s “Wicked” doesn’t contain hallmarks from the musical, like a “Popular”-esque union between Glinda and Elphaba. But it takes detours the musical never would have space for — long explanations of religious sects, descriptions of terrain never mentioned in the musical and, well, quite a bit of R-rated content. For example: Elphaba bites off a midwife’s finger as an newborn; her parents are involved in what is essentially a loving throuple with a Quadling man named Turtle Heart; Fiyero is a child groom married off at 7. Plus, there is inclusion of sexual assault, bestiality, murder, racism and politics.“Trigger warning for everything. If you can think of it, it’s in here,” Eryn Kieffer, whose multipart read-along of “Wicked” has amassed millions of views on TikTok, said in a video.Asia Lin and Eryn [email protected], @eryn810 via TikTokKieffer’s series goes into all the graphic scenes she wasn’t expecting — like the Clock of the Time Dragon’s puppet show or the Philosophy Club scenes, which have become shorthand for the book’s surprising sexual detours. Among “Wicked” fans, the book’s content is divisive. Kieffer, on her end, said that the sexual content “muddles the plot.” Ribeiro says she loves the “shock value” in the books and that the unexpected parts were her favorite to read — but ultimately took away from what she considered the “point” of the book.“I think I was so distracted by all of the weird stuff that was going on that the political aspect of it was overshadowed,” she says.Meanwhile, TikToker Aynsley Broom worries the focus on salaciousness takes attention from the book’s more powerful parts about the rise of authoritarianism, which she sees as a “mirror” to the news. In the book, the Wizard of Oz is a despot who ostracizes and marginalizes entire classes of Ozians, not to mention Animals.“I saw a video that was like, ‘(The book) explicitly describes (Elphaba’s) pubic hair.’ And I was like, ‘Not really. The book just said it was purple and then moved on,’” she says. “To me, the stuff people are focusing on is completely missing the message. The message needs to be talked more about than the shocking parts, which to me, weren’t that shocking. Granted, I also read a lot of romance novels.” In the book, she sees a more substantial offering than the musical — calling the former “a great dinner” and the latter “cotton candy.”Broom is among the readers who want a more faithful adaptation of Maguire’s “Wicked” than another retelling of the more saccharine musical. “I think people want fluff, and we don’t need more fluff,” she says.Maguire, on his end, seems at peace with the adaptation. During a 2020 interview pegged to the book’s anniversary, he said the musical’s composer, Stephen Schwartz, presented his vision during a walk in Connecticut, and that he felt they were aligned — that Schwartz understood his book and the moral universe it’s set in.“I came home and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to let this happen, I don’t care about the money. This is far more in line with why I wrote the book than the movie scripts I’ve read so far,’” he told Broadway World.Maguire said he was “very happy” with the way Schwartz and book writer Winnie Holzman told the story. “It made efficient, economic and narrative sense for them to make the story choices that they chose to do, and I applaud it completely. The play is a little less subtle than the novel in some ways. And I wanted the novel to be more ambiguous because that’s the nature of how I was trying to tell my story,” he said.What TikTokers generally agree on, though, is that “Wicked” the book is certainly not as kid-friendly as “Wicked” the musical. Creators like TikToker Sal Currie are remarking on their experiences reading the books as kids, and giving a heads up to parents who might be persuaded by the newly rebranded cover. “My main thing is — it’s not for kids. It’s really, truly not for children. The musical is completely fine for kids. I would not say this book is at all,” Kieffer tells TODAY.com.Ammons says her mom bought the book when she was a young child. She asked if she could read it.“She said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ And she said, ‘You’ll understand when you’re older,’” she says. Ammons ultimately waited until she was 22 to read Maguire’s novel. “My first reaction was like, ‘Yeah, I’m glad I waited to read this, because my mom was right on this one,’” she says.Others think reading, and being bewildered by, “Wicked” is a rite of passage: “It’s a canon event for most ‘Wicked’ fans,” one comment on Currie’s post reads. “We must not interfere.”