This past year’s National Book Awards gala presented an ironic, yet at this point increasingly familiar scene: Held in the glittering halls of Cipriani’s on Wall Street, the attendees—dressed in their finest, dining at one of New York’s famed upscale spots—spent the evening showering prizes on a very specific subset of writing: for young people’s literature, a graphic memoir of an awkward Asian American teen coming of age during a class trip in Europe; for translated literature, a novel about an old gay man who reflects on his clandestine teenage romance with his best friend; for poetry, a collection about the history and culture of the Chamoru people native to Guam; for nonfiction, a Howard Zinn-style history of the United States from a Native American perspective; and finally, for fiction, an experimental novel about two queer Puerto Rican men that wax on about the work of a pioneering sexuality researcher. Other finalists for the fiction award included a novel about Black prisoners being forced to fight to the death for the amusement of racist white viewers, a novel about three generations of Native Americans forced to attend boarding schools set up by racist white government officials, and not one, but two novels about racist white Christian missionaries that try to convert BIPOC souls.
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