Gilead is a novel by Marilynne Robinson published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980). Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several occasions in a form combining a journal and a memoir. It comprises the fictional autobiography of John Ames, an elderly, white Congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa, who knows that he is dying of a heart condition. At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956. Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his seven-year-old son, who will have few memories of him. Ames indicates he was born in 1880. He said that he was seventy-six years old at the time of writing.
Hisham Matar is an American-born British-Libyan novelist, essayist, and memoirist. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and his memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and several other awards. Matar's essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, and many other publications. He has also written several other novels.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
Gregory Stephen Tate was an American writer, musician, and producer. A long-time critic for The Village Voice, Tate focused particularly on African-American music and culture, helping to establish hip-hop as a genre worthy of music criticism. Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (1992) collected 40 of his works for the Voice and he published a sequel, Flyboy 2, in 2016. A musician himself, he was a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition and the leader of Burnt Sugar.
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and nonfiction book author.
The Goldfinch is a novel by the American author Donna Tartt. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other honors. Published in 2013, it was Tartt's first novel since The Little Friend in 2002.
Jonathan Rosen is an American author and editor.
Hua Hsu is an American writer and academic, based in New York City. He is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His work includes investigations of immigrant culture in the United States, as well as public perceptions of diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. His second book, Stay True: A Memoir, was published in September 2022.
Chris Jackson is an American publisher and editor-in-chief of the One World imprint of Random House.
Priestdaddy is a memoir by American poet Patricia Lockwood. It was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times and was awarded the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor. In 2019, The New York Times included the book on its list "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years," and The Guardian named it one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between is a memoir by Hisham Matar that was first published in June 2016. The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize, becoming the first nonfiction book to do so.
Dina Nayeri is an Iranian-American novelist, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer. She wrote the novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2014) and Refuge (2017) and the creative nonfiction books: The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), The Waiting Place (2020), and Who Gets Believed (2023).
The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is based on the historic Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and was revealed as highly abusive. A university investigation found numerous unmarked graves for unrecorded deaths and a history into the late 20th century of emotional and physical abuse of students.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is a 2018 book by writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. It focuses on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and received widespread critical acclaim.
Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures is a 2020 non-fiction book on mycology by British biologist Merlin Sheldrake. His first book, it was published by Random House on 12 May 2020.
A Promised Land is a memoir by Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Published on November 17, 2020, it is the first of a planned two-volume series. Remaining focused on his political career, the presidential memoir documents Obama's life from his early years through to the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The book is 768 pages long and available in digital, paperback, and hardcover formats and has been translated into two dozen languages. There is also a 29-hour audiobook edition that is read by Obama himself.
The Friend is a novel by American writer Sigrid Nunez published by Riverhead Books in 2018. The book concerns an unnamed novelist who adopts a Great Dane that belonged to a deceased friend and mentor.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is a 2020 autobiographical book of essays written by the Korean American author Cathy Park Hong. It was published by Penguin Random House in the United States and Profile Books in the United Kingdom and is composed of seven essays about growing up as an Asian-American in a Western capitalist society, more specifically in the United States of America. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography in 2020.
Everything Sad Is Untrue: is a young adult/middle grade autobiographical novel by Daniel Nayeri, published August 25, 2020 by Levine Querido. In 2021, the book won the Michael L. Printz Award, Judy Lopez Memorial Award for Children's Literature, and Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature.
Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is a 2023 book by journalist Patricia Evangelista, published by Random House. The book documents the thousands of Filipinos killed by extrajudicial death squads and vigilantes during the administration of the president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte.
