Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout, a racial satire that sends up everything from segregation to police brutality, took home the top prize for fiction at the National Book Critics Circle Awards on Thursday night.
Another book that deals with race in America won for best autobiography: Negroland, by Margo Jefferson, who has previously won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Sam Quinones was rewarded in the general nonfiction category for Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic, while Maggie Nelson won the prize for criticism for The Argonauts, a memoir and meditation on gender and sexuality.
Gender also figured prominently in the book that won for best biography: Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley profiled the two early feminists.
Ross Gay was recognized in the poetry category for Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, while Kristin Valdez Quade’s story collection Night at the Fiestas won the John Leonard Prize for an outstanding first book.
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