James McBride, winner of the Library's 2024 Prize for American Fiction, took the main stage at the National Book Festival last weekend, delighting a rapturous crowd with anecdotes and observations about his best-selling books and his remarkable writing career. "Love is the greatest novel ever written," he said. "That's it."
This weekend at the Library’s National Book Festival, fans of Kazu Kibuishi’s epic Amulet series will have a chance to hear him read from his ninth and final book in the series, “Waverider” and talk about how he created the immersive world where his graphic novels are set. Here, he answers a few questions about his creative process.
Pablo Cartaya’s novels touch on themes of family, culture and community, so it was no surprise when my 11-year-old daughter connected with the young characters of his latest book, “Curveball.” This weekend at the National Book Festival, Cartaya will be talking about "Curveball" and reading from an earlier book, "Tina Cocolina: Queen of the Cupcakes." In this piece, he answered a few of our most pressing questions.
Stories can be a lot of things, as journalist and novelist Annalee Newitz writes in “Stories Are Weapons,” but in the end they are powerful instruments that can be used for good or evil, to comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. “The thing about stories is that they are emotional and oftentimes appeal to …
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the internationally recognized philosopher, author and professor, will be awarded the 2024 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today. The $500,000 prize, awarded every two years, recognizes individuals whose outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has shaped public affairs and civil society. Since the 1990s, Appiah’s work has been widely regarded as having deepened the understanding of ideas around identity and belonging, concepts that remain deeply consequential. The Library is developing programming on the theme of “Thinking Together” that will showcase Appiah’s work for a public audience.
At the end of the 19th century, educator William Henry Crogman had a revolutionary idea: a textbook on African American history, achievements and survival for Black students both in and outside of the classroom. His "Progress of a Race," a textbook that told the history of African Americans as overcoming violence and bigotry, was not the first of its kind but probably the most influential. It caught on quickly, was heavily circulated and sold door-to-door through subscription for decades. The Library preserves several editions of this book, including the 1898 first edition.
The Library will award the 2024 Prize for American Fiction to novelist and author James McBride, Librarian Carla Hayden announced today. McBride, 66, is the author of the hugely popular memoir "The Color of Water," novels such as “The Good Lord Bird” (winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction) and, most recently "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store," which received the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was named Barnes and Noble’s 2023 Book of the Year. In 2016, he was awarded the the National Humanities Medal. He will be awarded the Prize for Fiction at the 2024 National Book Festival.
The folklorist Sidney Robertson was one of the trailblazing American women of the 1930s and 1940s, the kind of life you’d associate with Martha Gellhorn, Dorothea Lange or Zora Neale Hurston. Her work directing the California Folk Music Project from 1938-40 is the subject "California Gold," a new book from the Library and the University of California Press.
—This is a guest post by Meg McAleer, a former historian in the Manuscript Division. Sigmund Freud returned again and again to the problem of memory as he formulated his theories of psychoanalysis during the 1890s, as the Library’s significant collection of his papers show. “What is essentially new about my theory,” Freud wrote in …
