Carnegie Medal For Excellence

Swimmers 2023 Winner
Immense World Winner

The American Library Association (ALA) has announced the winners for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The awards recognize the previous year’s best fiction and nonfiction books written for adult readers and published in the United States. The Swimmers, by Julia Otsuka, was named the fiction winner. An Immense World, by Ed Yong, was named the nonfiction winner.

The Swimmers

The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka

From the best-selling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine comes a novel about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool. This searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters--and the sorrows of implacable loss--is the most commanding and unforgettable work yet from a modern master.

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Nonfiction Winner

An Immense World

An Immense World, by Ed Yong

A thrilling, dazzling tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong.

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Fiction Finalists

Greenland

Greenland, by David Santos Donaldson

A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl--in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

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Night of the Living Rez

Night of the Living Rez, by Morgan Talty

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.

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Nonfiction Finalists

Constructing a Nervous System

Constructing a Nervous System, by Margo Jefferson

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others--her parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer. In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics.

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Vagina Obscura

Vagina Obscura, by Rachel E. Gross

A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet.

That is finally changing. Today, a new generation of researchers is turning its gaze to the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making--the uterus, ovaries, and vagina--and illuminating them as part of a dynamic, resilient, and ever-changing whole. Welcome to Vagina Obscura, an odyssey into a woman's body from a fresh perspective, ushering in a whole new cast of characters.

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