Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1985.
The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. Set in Virginia during the antebellum era, it examines the issues regarding the ownership of Black slaves by both White and Black Americans.
Alex Ross is an American music critic and author who specializes in classical music. Ross has been a staff member of The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His extensive writings include performance and record reviews, industry updates, cultural commentary, and historical narratives in the realm of classical music. He has written three well-received books: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Listen to This (2011), and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020).
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Seven Stories Press is an independent American publishing company. Based in New York City, the company was founded by Dan Simon in 1995, after establishing Four Walls Eight Windows in 1984 as an imprint at Writers and Readers, and then incorporating it as an independent company in 1986 together with then-partner John Oakes. Seven Stories was named for its seven founding authors: Annie Ernaux, Gary Null, the estate of Nelson Algren, Project Censored, Octavia E. Butler, Charley Rosen, and Vassilis Vassilikos.
Daniel Adam Mendelsohn is an American author, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, the Editor at Large of the New York Review of Books, and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction.
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is a non-fiction memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn, published in September 2006, which has received critical acclaim as a new perspective on Holocaust remembrance. It was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Prix Médicis in France. It was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper History Prize in the UK and placed second for the 2006 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Nonfiction. An international bestseller, The Lost has been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, German, Romanian, Turkish, Norwegian, and Hebrew.
Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-born British author, filmmaker and academic. Her writing and films explore migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.
Alan H. Weisman is an American author, professor and journalist.
The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, established in 1981, is an annual literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle in honor of its first president, Ivan Sandrof. The award "is given to a person or institution who has, over time, made significant contributions to book culture." The Sandrof Award has also been presented as the "Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing" and the "Ivan Sandrof Award, Contribution to American Arts & Letters."
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity is a non-fiction book by Andrew Solomon published in November 2012 in the United States and two months later in the UK, about how families accommodate children with physical, mental and social disabilities and differences.
Mathias Énard is a French novelist. He studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for about fifteen years, interrupted in 2013 by a writing residency in Berlin. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Prix Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, and the Prix du Roman-News for Rue des Voleurs. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for Boussole (Compass). In 2020 he was Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor for World Literature at the University of Bern.
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.
Feel Free: Essays is a 2018 book of essays by Zadie Smith. It was published on 8 February 2018 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. It has been described as "thoroughly resplendent" by Maria Popova, who writes: "Smith applies her formidable mind in language to subjects as varied as music, the connection between dancing and writing, climate change, Brexit, the nature of joy, and the confusions of personhood in the age of social media."
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.
Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020. It tells the story of the youngest of three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother Agnes in 1980s post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland.
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, established in 2005, is an annual American literary award presented by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." Awards are presented annually to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism. Between 1983 and 2004, the award was presented jointly with biography.
