Everett’s acclaimed remodeling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the angle of Jim, Huck Finn’s enslaved companion, has already obtained the Nationwide E-book Award and the Kirkus Prize and is a finalist for a Nationwide E-book Critics Circle award. “James” has even topped The New York Occasions fiction hardcover checklist, a uncommon feat in recent times for a literary work that wasn’t a serious ebook membership choose or film tie-in.
“Percival Everett has written a modern masterpiece, a beautiful and important work that offers a fresh perspective from the eyes of a classic character,” Allison Escoto, chair of the award’s choice committee, mentioned in a press release. “Kevin Fedarko’s unforgettable journey through the otherworldly depths of the Grand Canyon shows us the triumphs and pitfalls of exploration and illuminates the many vital lessons we can all learn from our precious natural world.”
Fedarko is a former Time journal correspondent whose work additionally has appeared in The New York Occasions and Esquire. A Pittsburgh native fascinated by distant locations, Fedarko has a protracted historical past with libraries — Carnegie libraries. He remembers visiting two whereas rising up, notably one within the suburb of Oakmont close to the hairdressing salon his dad and mom ran. He would learn biographies of historic figures from George Washington to Daniel Boone, and in any other case consider libraries as “important threads running through his life,” home windows to a “wider world.”
Now a resident of Flagstaff, Ariz., Fedarko says that he relied partly on the library on the close by Northern Arizona College campus for each “A Walk in the Park” and its predecessor, additionally in regards to the Grand Canyon, “The Emerald Mile.”
“The library has an important and unique collection about the Grand Canyon, and it’s the backbone of the kind of history that helps form the framework of both books,” Fedarko says. “Neither of them could have been done without the library.”