Award Winners LibGuide: Fiction Winners

Lesbian Fiction Winner 4th Annual
The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it portrays them, communally, unapologetically, roaming fiercely over space and time. Jewelle Gomez sees right into the heart. This is a book to give to those you want most to find their own strength. This remarkable novel begins in the 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story. Jewelle Gomez is a writer, activist, and author of many books including Forty-Three Septembers, Don't Explain, The Lipstick Papers, Flamingoes and Bears, and Oral Tradition. The Gilda Stories was the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards and was adapted for the stage by the Urban Bush Women theater company in thirteen United States cities. Alexis Pauline Gumbs was named one of UTNE Reader's 50 Visionaries Transforming the World, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, a Black Woman Rising nominee, and was awarded one of the first-ever "Too Sexy for 501c3" trophies. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. In sensuous prose, Jewelle Gomez uses the vampire story as a vehicle for a re-telling of American history in which the disenfranchised finally get their say. Her take on queerness, community, and the vampire legend is as radical and relevant as ever. The Gilda Stories are both classic and timely. Gilda emphasizes the importance of tenets at the crux of black feminism while her stories ring with the urgency of problems that desperately need to be resolved in our current moment. This revolutionary classic by a pioneer in black speculative fiction will delight and inspire generations to come.

Lesbian Fiction Winner in 30th Annual
Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with "An Untamed State" and the New York Times bestselling essay collection "Bad Feminist". Gay returns with "Difficult Women", a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children and must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls' fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.

Gay General Fiction Winner 20th Annual
Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.

Gay Men's Fiction Winner 15th Annual
Set in Dublin, At Swim, Two Boys follows the year to Easter 1916, the time of Ireland's brave but fractured uprising against British rule. O'Neill tells the story of the love of two boys: Jim, a naive and reticent scholar and the younger son of the foolish aspiring shopkeeper Mr. Mack, and Doyler, the dark, rough-diamond son of Mr. Mack's old army pal. Doyler might once have made a scholar like Jim, might once have had prospects like Jim, but his folks sent him to work, and now, schoolboy no more, he hauls the parish midden cart, with socialism and revolution and willful blasphemy stuffed under his cap. And yet the future is rosy, Jim's father is sure. His elder son is away fighting the Hun for God and the British Army, and he has such plans for Jim and their corner shop empire. But Mr. Mack cannot see that the landscape is changing, nor does he realize the depth of Jim's burgeoning friendship with Doyler. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the scandalous nude, the two boys meet day after day. There they make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, Easter 1916, they will swim the bay to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves. Ten years in the writing, At Swim, Two Boys has already caused a sensation in England and Ireland, earning lavish praise for its masterful portrayal of class, tradition, and the conflict that has haunted Ireland for centuries. Jamie O'Neill's poetic and evocative storytelling makes him a natural successor to James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. At its heart, At Swim, Two Boys is a tender and tragic love story that will resonate with all readers. But it is also a compelling and important work, a novel about people caught up in the tide of history -- set in a place and culture both unfamiliar and unforgettable.

Gay Men's Fiction Winner 10th Annual
To read this wonderful book with its prayer-like rhythms, with its beautiful pacing of a familiar tale, holds a reward for the reader. One of the most daunting and original novels to emerge in recent years, in only 224 pages. The Far Euphrates raises the central questions of Western Culture: how we can find meaning in a post-Holocaust world; how we define the notion of 'home' in our modern time; where the boundaries lie between sanity, madness, and transcendence; and what our responsibilities are to ourselves and to each other. The Far Euphrates is the story of a lonely boy, the son of a rabbi, whose small world is touched by an unlikely range of people: a dying wealthy girl, a Gypsy prophetess, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II, and the cantor and his twin sister', both victims of Aushwitz's Dr. Mengele. The recipient of secrets he can't bear to know, Alexander engages himself in the accumulation of knowledge, in an attempt to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Infused with rich mystical and scientific understanding, The Far Euphrates poignantly addresses the human longing to know and reclaim our origins, the mythic Far Euphrates to which we can never return. In publishing it, Riverhead Books is proud to introduce a dazzling and important literary debut, a bold and memorable contribution to American letters.