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2024 Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist


Showing 1 - 12 of 12  There are a total of 16 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Enter ghost"
Star rating for Enter ghost
Description:
"A bold, evocative new novel from the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 and Betty Trask Award winner Isabella Hammad that follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet. After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers...
Book cover for "The five sorrowful mysteries of Andy Africa"
Star rating for The five sorrowful mysteries of Andy Africa
Description:
Falling hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on, Andy Africa, an unusually smart fifteen-year-old in Kontagora, Nigeria, is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent. Andrew Aziza is a fifteen-year-old boy living in Kontagora in Northern Nigeria. He lives with his secretive mother, Gloria, and spends his days about town with his droogs, Slim...
Book cover for "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store"
Star rating for The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...
Book cover for "I have some questions for you"
Star rating for I have some questions for you
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"In the riveting new novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers, a woman must reckon with her past when new details surface about a tragedy at her elite New England boarding school"- - "A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past--the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the...
Book cover for "Land of milk and honey"
Star rating for Land of milk and honey
Author:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"About a Chinese American chef who, lured to a decadent, enigmatic colony of the superrich in a near future in which food is disappearing, discovers the meaning of pleasure and the ethics of who gets to enjoy it, altering her life and, indirectly, the world"-- A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles....
Book cover for "The laughter"
Star rating for The laughter
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Dr. Oliver Harding, a tenured professor of English, is long settled into the routines of a divorced, aging academic. But his quiet, staid life is upended by his new colleague, Ruhaba Khan, a dynamic Pakistani Muslim law professor. Ruhaba unexpectedly ignites Oliver's long- dormant passions, a secret desire that quickly tips towards obsession after her teenaged nephew, Adil Alam, arrives from France to stay with her. Getting to know them, Oliver tries...
Book cover for "Let us descend"
Star rating for Let us descend
Author:
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
'Let us descend,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world.' -Inferno, Dante Alighieri. Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who...
Book cover for "Temple folk"
Star rating for Temple folk
Description:
"A groundbreaking debut collection portraying the lived experiences of Black Muslims grappling with faith, family, and freedom in America"-- "In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in the United States. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists...
Book cover for "What happened to Ruthy Ramirez"
Star rating for What happened to Ruthy Ramirez
Average Rating:
2.5 stars
Description:
"The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen year old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman's hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left...
Book cover for "When trying to return home"
Star rating for When trying to return home
Description:
Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in this volume dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college...
Book cover for "Witness"
Star rating for Witness
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"An elegant, stirring, insistent new book bearing out actions taken and not taken, from the acclaimed National Book Award finalist"-- "In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters--from children to grandmothers to ghosts--live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for,...
Book cover for "Yellowface"
Star rating for Yellowface
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"What's the harm in a pseudonym? Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn't write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American--in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut...