Women Win Both Fiction and Non-Fiction National Book Awards

Sisters are doing it for themselves! This time in the realm of literature. The National Book Award winners were announced yesterday, and ladies took home the gold in both fiction and non-fiction categories.

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.