Women Win Both Fiction and Non-Fiction National Book Awards

Louise Erdrich’s The Round House is about a boy coming of age in the wake of a terrible crime on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. With 4.2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, this book is doing the unthinkable on the internet — getting people not to talk shit about it! They like you, The Round House, they really, really like you.

Katherine Boo* won for her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity; the award-winning journalist’s debut is narrative nonfiction that explores the heartbreaking stories of families striving toward better lives in a divided city. I’m going to read this starting today and cry and cry and maybe we can have a bookclub where we just get drunk, read sad passages from this book, and hold each other. Who’s in?

Congrats, talented and inspirational female novelists — and I hope the rest of you slackers are reaching the half-way marks on your National Novel Writing Month tomes, they could be your ticket to literary stardom.

*If I were her, I’d legally add an exclamation mark to my last name or add an extra “Boo” and “Bear” to the end. So many possibilities.