2022 Shortlist
The Song of the Cell
Personal Highlights:
  • A cell brings materiality and physicality to a set of genes. A cell enlivens genes. But a cell
  • In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
  • These pores or cells were not very deep but consisted of “a great many little boxes.” In short, this piece of cork was created out...
Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
Personal Highlights:
  • Even while he’d been creaming the butter and sugar, his mind was not so much upon the here and now and on this Sunday nearing...
Pig Years - Ellyn Gaydos
Personal Highlights:
  • There is the established wisdom, but still there are no false promises. Things thrive or die, and the farmer hopes to tip the balance toward...
  • early settlers felled whole swaths of birch and buried corn around the stumps, after which they would release herds of swine to dig around and...
  • Root harvest is the hardest work of the year, pleasurable in its finitude when the weather turns cold, and the reaping heavy and repetitive before...
River Town - Peter Hessler
Personal Highlights:
  • I never gained more than a vague understanding of what Historical Materialism means—it has something to do with Class Struggle—but authenticating was the key. Not...
  • Most of them were cabs, and virtually every cabby in Fuling had rewired his horn so it was triggered by a contact point at the...
  • They were accustomed to learning by rote, which meant that they often followed models to the point of plagiarism. They were also inveterate copiers; it...
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Personal Highlights:
  • “Everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial.
  • We call people like Kofi American-African, not African-American, which is what we call our brothers and sisters whose ancestors were slaves.”
  • The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. She got up and left a big tip on the counter. For a long time afterwards,...