Edwin L. Shuman Fiction Award and Helen G. Scott Prize for Best Critical Essay on American Literature
An excerpt from the fiction winner Heart of a Dog:
Yeltsin and his tanks were the news of the week. I could see the footage from over my grandfather’s shoulder, clunky atrocities parked in front of our white parliament building. A cool breeze turned my head to the outside. I was standing at the kitchen window, letting the sticky cooking steam stream out. I was breathing. That was all there was to do for those few seconds. October meant that even from the seventh floor the air smelled of wet bark. If we were on the brink of a civil war, I couldn’t tell from glancing down. The old ladies, wool scarves tied beneath sagging chins, still sat on the benches beneath the apple trees, the tiny fruit now rotting at their feet. People still dusted their rugs from the windows of the identical walk-up across the way from ours, distance blurring what I knew to be intricate patterns into uniform blue, or uniform red, or uniform green against the smooth grey stone of the building. I could see a woman who looked no older than me beating one with a brush, great, billowing clouds coming off it like a muddy snowstorm.
An excerpt from Best Critical Essay Down by the Water: Dry Baptism and the Subversion of Religious Symbolism in Go Tell It on the Mountain:
When Elizabeth describes her move from her home to New York with Richard, she describes it as being ‘on the edge of a steep place: and down she rushed, on the descent uncaring, into the dreadful sea’ (191)…the sea is not purifying, it is a symbol of descent, hopelessness, loss, the inability to hold on to something and find one’s way…Baldwin takes the preconceived notion of what water is to Christianity and molds it to his own narrative, using the idea of water as descent to highlight a different theme in his novel, the theme that in a city so plagued by racism, his subjects, in this case the doomed Richard, live ‘without the hope, or possibility of release, or resolution’ (192). Baldwin takes great pains to crystallize the idea that if every Christian struggles between sinking into the sea and reaching God’s promised mountaintop, then for the black Christian this struggle is amplified sevenfold by the discriminatory structures that leave him labeled as guilty even before God’s judgement, just as Richard was when accused of a crime he didn’t commit.