With anticipation of life in Trump’s America weighing heavily throughout the evening, the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening was a bastion of diversity, resistance and hope, celebrating joy and the enduring power of words and reading to change and reframe the world. Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad was expected to win the fiction award, and is by far the most commercially successful of the year’s NBA contenders, but the emotion of the evening and its celebration of stories, publishers and sentiments outside of the mainstream was less expected. As chair of the nonfiction judges Masha Gessen noted in discussing […]
