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Two Boston-area authors among the finalists for National Book Critics Circle Award

Maggie Doherty and Namwali Serpell, both of Harvard, are finalists for the awards, considered among the most prestigious in American letters. The awards for publishing year 2020 will be presented in March.

Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman ‘has always been an absolute supernova’

Poets and professors who know Gorman's work and have watched her rise knew she would shine brightly on the Capitol steps.

Heal thyself in ‘The Doctors Blackwell’

Janice Nimura’s candid account engagingly captures Elizabeth Blackwell’s many contradictions, central to which was the condescension, and sometimes outright contempt, she showed her fellow women even as she sacrificed to open doors for them as the first woman to earn a medical degree in the US.

A fan of Wonder Woman and librarians

Robert Jones Jr.’s much anticipated debut novel, “The Prophets,” tells the story of two Black enslaved men who fall in love on a cotton plantation in Antebellum Mississippi.

BOOKS
Life after loss in ‘Sanctuary’
After the death of her son, Ronan, to Tay-Sachs disease before his 3rd birthday, a journey she writes about in her previous memoir “The Still Point of the Turning World” (2014), Black finds herself living in the aftermath of unimaginable loss. In a new book, she refuses to usher the reader through the tidy, well-bordered stages of grief. Instead, she is rebuilding a life in ways that are messy, erratic, and devastating while finding moments of joy, strength, and resilience, a word she’s wrestled with.

BOOKS
Writing against all odds in ‘The Copenhagen Trilogy’
Rediscovering prolific Danish author Tove Ditlevsen.

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BOOKS

Remembering an Irish childhood in ‘Walking With Ghosts’

Gabriel Byrne also reflects on his life as an actor in a lyrical and moving new memoir.

A new poetry volume, a Harvard graduate doing great things, and a novel set in rural Vermont

Bookish news from around the region.

Virtual author readings January 24-30

All events take place online; visit the venue website for more information.

Local bestsellers for the week ending January 17

Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound.

In ‘Land,’ Simon Winchester looks at what the hunger for land ownership has wrought

Few authors of narrative nonfiction have ranged across the global landscape more widely than Winchester. In his latest engrossing voyage, the author turns to the land itself, covering a sizable portion of the 37 billion acres that compose the Earth.

Essays on the magic and poetry of art and place by André Aciman

A slow stroll through entrancing capitals, a tender remembrance of rare old films, a fresh contemplation of Modernist literary giants — this describes the material of André Aciman’s new assortment of essays, but not the magic.

Paulette Jiles on reading about crime, action, and exploration

Readers first met, if briefly, the itinerant musician Simon Boudin in Jiles’s best-selling and critically acclaimed novel “News of the World.” In “Simon the Fiddler,” Jiles turns the spotlight on Boudin and follows him as he navigates the Civil War and its rocky aftermath in Texas.

A new children’s book about Ona Judge, new poetry by Martín Espada, and a biography of iconic Black feminist Dorothy Pitman Hughes

News of a literary bent from around the region.