 First edition cover | |
| Author | Jason Mott |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Dutton |
Publication date | 2021 |
| Pages | 323 pp |
| ISBN | 978-0593330999 |
Hell of a Book [lower-alpha 1] is a 2021 book by Jason Mott. It won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
In alternating chapters, the novel tells the stories of two different characters: a nameless novelist on tour for a book also titled Hell of a Book, and an African-American child named Soot. Soot, who lives near Whiteville, North Carolina, is being bullied on the school bus, while the novelist is troubled by visions of a child he calls "The Kid", who speaks to him in riddles.
The Star-News said that with the novel, Mott earned "a place on the shelf beside such African-American writers as Colson Whitehead and Octavia Butler". [1]
On November 17, 2021, the novel was awarded the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. [2] It was also longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, [3] the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, [4] and the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. [5]
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to the authors of the year's best works of fiction by living American citizens. The winner receives US$15,000 and each of four runners-up receives US$5000. Finalists read from their works at the presentation ceremony in the Great Hall of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The organization claims it to be "the largest peer-juried award in the country." The award was first given in 1981.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Them is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the third in the Wonderland Quartet she inaugurated with A Garden of Earthly Delights. It was published by Vanguard in 1969 and it won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1970.
Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Peter Ho Davies, is a contemporary British writer of Welsh and Chinese descent.
Darin Strauss is a best-selling American writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including, among numerous others, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Strauss's 2011 book Half a Life, won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography. His most recent book, The Queen of Tuesday, came out in August, 2020. It is currently nominated for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her Licence de lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Randall Silvis is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and teacher.
Michael Thomas is an American author. He won the 2009 International Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel Man Gone Down, receiving a prize of €100,000. Man Gone Down is also recommended by The New York Times.
Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist. She has twice won the Giller Prize, for her novels Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black.
An American Marriage is a novel by the American author Tayari Jones. It is her fourth novel and was published by Algonquin Books on February 6, 2018. In February 2018, the novel was chosen for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. The novel also won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday.
David John Young is an English novelist whose crime thriller series featuring a fictional Volkspolizei detective, Karin Müller, is set in 1970s East Germany. Young's debut novel Stasi Child won the 2016 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger for the best historical crime novel of the year. Both it and the follow-up, Stasi Wolf, were longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2016 and 2017 respectively. In 2017, Bonnier Zaffre, the UK adult fiction division of the Bonnier Group, announced Young had signed a six-figure deal for three further novels in the series, making five in all, with the third, A Darker State, being published in February 2018. Young says the inspiration for the series came after his indie pop band The Candy Twins toured Germany in 2007 and he read Anna Funder's non-fiction book Stasiland between gigs. He secured the tour thanks to favourable comments made by Edwyn Collins about a tribute song Young wrote about him. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Young was a news producer and editor for more than 25 years with BBC World Service radio and BBC World TV.
The Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize is an annual award presented by the New Literary Project to recognize mid-career writers of fiction. "Mid-career writer" is defined by the project as "an author who has published at least two notable books of fiction, and who has yet to receive capstone recognition such as a Pulitzer or a MacArthur." The prize, which carries a monetary award of $50,000, was established in 2017 and is administered by the New Literary Project, a collaboration of the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation of Lafayette, California and the Department of English of the University of California, Berkeley.
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.
The Other Americans is a mystery novel written by Moroccan American novelist Laila Lalami. The novel was published in 2019 by Pantheon Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Jason Mott is an American novelist and poet. His 2021 novel Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction.
The Trees is a 2021 novel by American author Percival Everett, published by Graywolf Press.
 | This article about American literature is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |