2021 Pen America Literary Award Winners

"This splendid story collection is a sword through the heart."--Ben Fountain

From the O. Henry Prize-winning author comes a heartbreakingly beautiful and brutal exploration of lives fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II.

Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United... Read more »

Winner of the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, HAD I KNOWN contains the most provocative, incendiary, and career-making pieces by bestselling author, essayist, political activist, and "veteran muckraker" Barbara Ehrenreich (The New Yorker).

A self-proclaimed "myth buster by trade," Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an... Read more »

Owls of the Eastern Ice

“This was just the kind of escape I needed: an epic adventure in a wild place and conservation story wrapped up in a skillfully crafted narrative. Jonathon Slaght engagingly tells the story of his PhD research project, tracking the Blakiston's Fish Owl in the wild reaches of eastern Russia. The world's largest owl, fish owls are super elusive, feeding on salmon in remote Russia, sharing its habitat with Amur tigers and humans trying to get by in extremely harsh circumstances. The owls haunt the pages, mostly unseen as Slaght and his team track them on snowmobile trips over treacherous ice and terrain. Encounters with the locals along the way add another layer to this conservation story. This is a go-to for birders, conservationists, and nature writing fans.”

Rachel, Brilliant Books Audio

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday... Read more »

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography*
*Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award*
*Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography*

A “captivating” (The Washington Post) work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo—the city that would become... Read more »

Sharks in the Time of Saviors

“Night Marchers, gods, goddesses, and the dead all walk Hawaii with the Flores family, if only they can stop struggling to survive long enough to see them. At seven years old, Nainoa falls into the Pacific only to be brought back to his mother in the mouth of a shark, unharmed and now burdened with the rumor of legend. Noa struggles to understand his gift and what he is supposed to do with it, and each of his family members grapples with their role as well. Every character is imbued with the truths of family and the magic of legend and you will not close this book unchanged. Beautiful and a must read! The readers on Libro.fm grant entrance in to this world with an authenticity difficult to obtain otherwise.”

Linda, Cellar Door Books