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31
Site Announcements / Playlist Update (February 10 - 16, 2024) for the Forum Gateway on Facebook
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 14, 2024, 02:26:54 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR FEBRUARY 10 - 16, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essays by Joe Carillo: “How to form our negative sentences correctly”


                                         
                                     
2. Use and Misuse: “Avoiding awful misuses of the English possessive”




3. Going Deeper Into Language: “Subordinate clauses don't always play second fiddle to main clauses”




4. Use and Misuse: “Why legal documents are not in plain and simple English”

           


5. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “The pause that refreshes”




6. Advocacy: “Bill Gates advocates environment-friendly subtitutes for animal fats in our food intake”




7. Your Thoughts Exactly: “The two hemispheres of me,” personal essay by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor]




8. Essays by Joe Carillo: “The germ of a great idea remembered”




9. Getting to Know English Better: “Why some intransitive verbs appear to take an object”





10. Language Humor at Its Finest: “A great stand-up comic’s thoughts about life and sundry things”




11. The Forum Lounge: “'Pun-ography' is wordplay to make you smile"



   
12. Time Out From English Grammar: “Even before the Enlightenment, Shakespeare already embraced science in his plays“




13. Advice and Dissent: “The Middle Ages weren’t just a time of long religious delirium and hysteria“




14. Students’ Sounding Board: “Dropping the introductory word 'that' in indirect speech”




15. Readings in Language: “Travails with learning just a smattering of Latin” with a posting by Tonybau, Forum Member and Contributor





32
Advocacies / Bill Gates advocates environment-friendly subtitutes for animal fat in our diet
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 14, 2024, 01:09:22 PM »
In Bill Gates' latest GatesNotes blog yesterday (Febrary 13), "I’m making big bets on novel fats and oils," the Microsoft founder and entrepreneur makes a strong advocacy for the commercial development of environment-friendly substitutes for animal fats and oils in the human food intake.

He himself admits his fondness for cheeseburgers but wishes this weren't the case considering the impact on the environment of their high animal fat content: "It's what gives so many foods their richness, juiciness, meltability, unique 'mouthfeel' and overall flavor. It’s what distinguishes butter from margarine, dairy ice cream from a plant-based frozen dessert, and a great burger from one made of soy protein or peas.


But Bill Gates says that this high consumption of food with high animal fat content is unfortunately a disaster for the Earth's climate: "Each year, the world emits 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases—and the production of fats and oils from animals and plants makes up seven percent of that. To combat climate change, we need to get the number to zero."

The course of action he is pursuing: "Find new ways of generating the same fat molecules found in animal products, but without greenhouse gas emissions, animal suffering, or dangerous chemicals. And they have to be affordable for everyone. It might sound like a pipe dream, but a company called Savor (which I’m invested in) is in the process of doing it... The result [of Savor's development efforts] is real fat molecules like the ones we get from milk, cheese, beef, and vegetable oils. [But] the process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does. And most important, it tastes really good—like the real thing, because chemically it is."

Read Bill Gates' "Greasy—and good for the planet" blog in full by clicking this link!

RELATED EARLIER READING IN THE FORUM:
Bill Gates funds developer of feed additive that reduces cow burps and farts


33
Getting to Know English / How to form our negative sentences correctly
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 14, 2024, 08:53:11 AM »
Let’s revisit the very important matter of negation in English.

We all know that the adjective “no”—as do its semantic cousins “not” and “never”—undermines and negates every single thought and idea to which it latches on: “No, I don’t like you.” “No, I have never loved you.” Doubtless the most subversive single word in English, “no” when placed right before an assertion negates it with brutal efficiency: “No parking.” “No swerving.” “No overloading.” “No election cheating.”

   
And when the negating job has to be done within a statement, “no” often takes the form of “not,” commanders the auxiliary verb “do” (in the required tense) and positions itself right between it and the action verb’s bare infinitive form: “The woman did not resist.” “The felon did not hesitate.” “The three computer engineers did not migrate.”

The pattern of negation is slightly different in the perfect tenses. The adverb “not” simply inserts itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, which remains in the past participle form even as the negation is consummated: “The woman has driven.” “The woman has not driven.” Always, “not” positions itself between the auxiliary verb and the main verb.

In contrast to the other “no” variants, the word “never” is a movable negator, certainly much more versatile than “not.” Look at how freely it positions itself: “That woman never drives.” “Never does the woman drive.” “The woman has never driven.” “Never has the woman driven.” “The woman never has driven.”

The adjective “no,” of course, can routinely negate any element by denoting its absence, contradiction, denial, or refusal: “Under no circumstances will Claudia’s offer be accepted.” “I see no sign of reconciliation.” The adverbs “not” and “never” work in much the same way: “Not a single drop of rain fell last summer.” “She will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

But there’s one major caveat on “not”: it’s wrong to use it in statements that have an “all…not” form (to mean “to the degree expected”). Take this sentence: “Not all of the women in the district did not vote for the lone female candidate.” That sentence is semantically problematic and confusing; it could be interpreted that “Some of the women did not vote for the lone female candidate,” or that “None of the women voted for the lone female candidate.”

Better to remove the ambiguity by fine-tuning the negation to yield the desired meaning. The first option: “Not all of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.” The second option: “None of the women in the district voted for the lone female candidate.”   

The same caveat should be observed by not using “not” with the adjective “every,” as in this ambiguous sentence: “Every candidate did not meet the voters’ expectations.” Better: “None of the candidates met the voters’ expectations.” “All of the candidates failed to meet the voters’ expectations.”

Apart from using “no,” “not,” and “never,” we can also use the lexical semantics of negation and affixal negation to reverse the sense of things. Lexical negation is simply the negative structuring of sentences by using words with negative denotations, such as “neither,” “nor,” “rarely,” “hardly,” and “seldom.” Affixal negation, on the other hand, negates positive words through the use of the affixes “un-”, “im-”/“in-”/“il-”, “dis-”, “de-”, and “-less,” as in “unnecessary,” “imperfect,” “ineffective,” “illegal,” “disregard,” “decamp,” and “useless.”

When using these negative affixes, however, we must firmly keep in mind to drop the “no,” “not,” or “never” in the sentence if our true intention is to negate the statement. Failure to do so will result in a grammatically incorrect double negative. “It is not illegal to steal,” for instance, will mean exactly its opposite, “It is legal to steal”—with all its dire consequences to civilized society.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
How to form our negative sentences correctly

This essay appeared as Chapter 151 of  my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

(Next: When the word “only” goes haywire)          February 22, 2024                                                                                              

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
34
Site Announcements / February 2024 roundup of 12 major perplexing English grammar aspects
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 12, 2024, 10:25:12 AM »
February 12, 2024

Dear Forum Member and Friend,

For its regular monthly edition this February, Jose Carillo's English Forum presents a roundup of 12 of my major essays over the years on the most challenging aspects of English grammar. I strongly suggest that you review them thoroughly to fortify your proficiency in both written and spoken English.


The 12 essays that were posted in the Forum from 2003 onwards are as follows:

1. Dealing with those baffling subject-verb disagreements
2. When notional agreement prevails over plain grammatical agreement
3. Coping with the vexing inverted syntax of passive-voice sentences
4. Fused sentences indicate failure to grammatically link ideas
5. Common pitfalls when a pronoun and noun form a compound subject
6. Dealing with sentence constructions that seem to defy grammar rules
7. Shedding off the active-voice straitjacket from our written and spoken English
8. So which should we use: a gerund, a full infinitive, or a bare infinitive?
9. An effective tool for whittling down complex sentences into simple ones
10. Grappling with the grammar of the indefinite pronouns
11. How to avoid semantic bedlam in the usage of the word "only"
12. The pronoun “none” can mean either “not one” or “not any”

You will  be able to access all these 12 essays directly from the Homepage of Jose Carillo's English Forum. Simply click this link: https://josecarilloforum.com/.

Please don't hesitate to send to the Forum (jcarilloforum@gmail.com) comments, suggestions, or clarificatory questions regarding the grammar topics taken up in these essays. I will make every effort to answer them in the discussion board where each particular essay is posted.

With my best wishes,
Joe Carillo
35
Site Announcements / Playlist Update (February 3 - 9, 2024) for the Forum Gateway on Facebook
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 06, 2024, 01:10:24 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR FEBRUARY 3 - 9, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essays by Joe Carillo: “Tales of perdition and destruction”

                                         
                                     
2. Getting to Know English: “A devilishly equivocal English grammar question”




3. Going Deeper Into Language: “When faulty logic overrides good grammar and semantics”




4. Students’ Sounding Board: "Differentiating the use of ‘than’ and ‘than that of’"




5. Advice and Dissent “Looking deeply into religious belief as a problem in international affairs”




6. Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Even in the TV reality-show era, our ticket to fame is really making things”




7. Views and Commentaries: “Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love” by Maximo Tumbali, Forum Contributor




8. Your Thoughts Exactly: “One final autumn: A Retrospective” by Fred Natividad, Forum Contributor




9. Language Humor at Its Finest: “20 highbrow jokes to wrack our brains and tickle our funnybones”




10. You Asked Me This Question: “Differentiation between misinformation and disinformation”



   
11. Students’ Sounding Board Retrospective: "Confusion over the use of ‘due to’ and ‘owing to’”




12. Advice and Dissent Retrlospective: “To survive, democracy needs to find a way to break its confidence trap”




13. Readings in Language: “Bridging the disconnect between simplistic and real, live English”




14. My Media English Watch: “Let’s be firm on whether the name ‘Philippines’ is singular or plural”




15. The Forum Lounge: U.S. radio-TV writer Andy Rooney's “33 golden nuggets of inspiration”





36
Essays by Joe Carillo / Tales of perdition and destruction
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 06, 2024, 07:38:37 AM »
Our country’s politically disturbing situation today has impelled me to hark back to this cautionary essay that I wrote in the early 2000s bewailing our tendency as a people “to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but terribly bad decisions that make life so miserable for many of us.”

In the engineering discipline there’s this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures—bridges and buildings, for instance—savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety’s sake, they have models of the structures “tested to destruction.”

The closest popular expression of this that I can think of is the English idiomatic expression “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” The allusion is, of course, not only to the danger of overloading beasts of burden but also to the perils of blind, unconditional trust in the capacity of things and people to perform beyond their natural, God-given limits. The folly of such behavior is captured chillingly in this haunting English lullaby familiar to most of us:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle, and all. 

That humorous English poet-mathematical logician Lewis Carroll (1832-1868) also captured this logic of destruction in the following rhyme about the fallen Humpty Dumpty’s fate in Alice in Wonderland:

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. 

     
                                          IMAGE CREDITS: (LEFT) FLORENCE MARY ANDERSON, PINTEREST.COM,  (RIGHT) PINTEREST.COM)

Literature and history are, in fact, replete with accounts of tragedies resulting from a failure to recognize the limits to the strength of materials. For instance, in the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by the American playwright-novelist Thornton Wilder ((1897-1975), five apparently morally faultless people on religious pilgrimage plunge to their death when a suspension bridge over a deep canyon snaps. Afterwards, a cleric investigates if there was anything bad or evil the victims had done in their lives for them to deserve such apparently senseless deaths.

Little attention was given to the state of the bridging materials and to their possible deterioration over time, nor to the possibility that the victims might have been, say, excessively overweight, that they may have clustered too close to one another at a weak spot, or that they might have gone into such religious frenzies—as in the Mardi Gras or our very own Ati-Atihan—for the bridge to snap in sympathetic vibration. Any of these circumstances might have been “the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” so to speak.

                                           IMAGE CREDIT: ELITEREADERS.COM

A parallel incident with similar religious overtones happened in Naga City in the Philippines way back in September of 1972. Right after a fluvial procession in honor of the Bicol Region’s religious patroness, Our Lady of Peñafrancia, had passed underneath an old wooden bridge over the Bicol River, the bridge collapsed. Several dozen devotees and onlookers, most of them boys and girls, were crushed to death or drowned.

To my knowledge, no religious investigation was done to connect their tragic fate to possible moral or reprehensible misdeeds in their life, as was done by the cleric who investigated “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” tragedy. However, just a few hours after the Bicol River bridge collapsed, I personally went to the scene and this was what I saw—the wooden rafters and railings were severely rotted, split, or cracked after years of exposure to sun, wind, rain, and termites. To my mind, there was no way the badly decayed wood could have held the weight of those hundreds of people jostling one another in religious frenzy on the bridge or hanging from its rafters. The faith of the devotees was incredibly strong, but the materials of the bridge simply had become so weak for carry their mortal weight.

In shipping as well, even the “battleship quality” steel of the ocean liner RMS Titanic fractured and broke that fateful night on April 14, 1912 when the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing over 1,500 passengers aboard. The ship’s hull, although made of what was touted as the best plain carbon ship-plate material available during the time, was damaged by the iceberg, and the rivet heads in the areas of contact simply popped off because of the tremendous forces created by the collision. This caused several seams in the hull to open up, flooding the ship’s watertight compartments. Because of their ductility, the rivets normally should have deformed first before failing, but according to some strength of materials analysts who examined materials from the wreckage many years later, they must have become so brittle in below-freezing water temperature. Their safety factor was thus breached and they failed.

As in these tales of perdition and destruction, the danger to all of us is that we have been so mercilessly conditioned by our contemporary culture, religion, and media to believe that everything is possible. We hardly put any safety factor in our personal, social, and political affairs. We thrive and even revel in blind faith and wishful thinking. We observe no minimum nor maximum measures, no standards, no limits to anything—be it a dream, a plan, a product, a support system, a mode of conveyance, an advocacy, or a vote or aspiration to an elective post. In sum, we don’t think logically and rationally. We consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Tales of perdition and destruction

This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 151 in my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

RELATED RECENT TRAGEDY (February 14,2024):
Church balcony in Bulacan PH collapses, 1 dead, 52 injured
 
(Next: How to form our negative sentences correctly)          February 15, 2024                                                                                              

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com
37
Site Announcements / Playlist Update (January 27-February 2, 2024) for the Forum Gateway on Facebook
« Last post by Joe Carillo on February 01, 2024, 06:43:27 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR JANUARY 27 - FEBRUARY 2, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 14 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essays by Joe Carillo: “Retrospective on political propaganda”


                                       

2. Badly Written, Badly Spoken: “The proper possessive adjective for the pronoun 'everybody'”




3. You Asked Me This Question: “How much paraphrasing can a writer do to direct quotes?”




4. Getting to Know English Better: “It’s a mark of civility to use ‘can’ and ‘may’ properly”




5. Essay by Jose Carillo Retrospective: “The real score about Valentine’s Day”




6. Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Valentine’s Day quiz for incurable English-speaking romantics”




7. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Not Only in My Dream!" by Angel Casillan, Forum Contributor




8. Time Out From English Grammar: Stripping away the encrusted myth around Cleopatra’s life”




9. Language Humor at its Finest: “A treasury of funny quotes and outrageous sayings”




10. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: “The prophet of Gaia feels the climate change issue is 'as severe as war'”



   
11. Students’ Sounding Board: “Which is correct and why? 'I didn’t (see, saw) her'.”




12. Readings in Language Retrospective: “The best languages to speak if you want to influence the world"


Many books are translated into and out of languages such as English, German, and Russian,
but Arabic has fewer translations relative to its many speakers. (Arrows between circles
represent translations; the size of a language’s circleis proportional to the number of people who speak it.)   

13. Time Out From English Grammar: “The psychometric test that promised to be an 'X-ray to the soul'”




14. Forum Lounge Retrospective: “The grand embodiment of all that’s grand and fraudulent in American mass culture"






38
Essays by Joe Carillo / Retrospective on political propaganda
« Last post by Joe Carillo on January 31, 2024, 07:09:07 AM »
Propaganda did not start as something undesirable or downright evil. In fact, it had its origins in what many of us would consider the holiest of causes. Over four centuries ago, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV was confronted with a twin-horned problem: heathens were fiercely resisting Christianity in the new lands that the papacy wanted to evangelize, and where the faith had already made a beachhead, heretics were attacking its very genuineness and patrimony.

                                                    IMAGE CREDITS: STEEMIT.COM (TOP), SLIDESERVE.COM (BOTTOM)
 
Alarmed, the 68-year-old pope, once a fiery and outspoken doctor of laws but now afflicted by a dreadful bladder stone barely two years into the papacy (he died of the illness a year later), decided to form a special task force. He called it the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or “the Congregation for propagating the faith,” and gave it the task of putting more teeth to the worldwide missionary activities of the Roman Catholic Church.

That congregation’s successes and failures are today firmly etched both in the world’s religious geography and in the inscrutable, sometimes shockingly irrational ways that people on both sides of the great religious divide view that world. That, of course, is a fascinating subject crying for an intelligent discussion, but at this time, we will limit ourselves to how the then entirely new word “propaganda” crept into the language, first into Latin and later into English, and how its practice evolved into a deadlier hydra than the twin-horned devil it was originally meant to vanquish.

Today, as most of us know, the word “propaganda” has become a noun that means “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” In plain and simple English, it is a one-sided form or persuasion seeking to make people decide and act without thinking. This blight on the logical thought process becomes virulent when serious clashes in religious, political, and ideological beliefs become inevitable. And what makes the once pious word and activity even more unchristian and linguistically anomalous is that it is waged as fanatically by the really bad guys as by the presumably good guys on our side.

The essential problem with propaganda, of course, is its single-minded goal of short-circuiting rational thought. As practiced in  Philippine election campaigns in recent memory, for instance, it is excessively bigoted in agitating our emotions, in exploiting our insecurities and ignorance, in taking advantage of the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of the language, and in bending the rules of logic whenever convenient or expedient. Propaganda can delude both the ignorant and intelligent alike, and the even greater danger is that even astute people could become its victims and crazed believers, as we are witnessing right now.

To fortify our defenses against political propaganda, we have to do two crucial things ourselves: (1) get to know at least the most basic tricks used by political propagandists to subvert rational thinking, and (2) cultivate an open and objective mind to counter their deceptions and sleights of the mind.

A practical first step for this propaganda-defusing process is to critically scrutinize those aspiring for the top national positions. For our own and this country’s sake, and no matter what the poll surveys and the TV or radio commercials say, we must cut the candidates or their proponents down to size. We must for decision-making purposes think of them simply as applicants for a specific job, or consider them as nothing more than branded products on the supermarket shelf.

By looking at a candidate as just another job applicant, we can greatly loosen the grip of his or her propaganda on our senses. That will allow us to dispassionately go over his or her application and résumé and make a reasonably sound judgment on the following basics: (1) communication and writing skills, (2) quality of mind and self-appraisal, and (3) qualifications and job-related work experience. Anybody who skips this elementary procedure for hiring entry-level stock clerks and senior corporate executives alike is obviously an incompetent, irresponsible fool who deserves to be fired outright. And yet, as we can all see, skipping this very basic process is what many propagandists of national candidates would like the Filipino electorate to do.

It would be even more instructive to treat the candidates simply as products on a supermarket shelf or public market stall. We can then proceed to mercilessly strip them of their elaborate branding and packaging to see the intrinsic worth of the actual product inside. It would shock many people to know that the cost of the packaging of certain shampoos in glitzy sachets can run to as much as 85 percent of their total selling price. How much more profound their shock would be to find that some highly touted candidates, when stripped of their glitzy imaging and positioning, are not trustworthy enough and have less probative value for the national positions they are seeking than the paper their faces and names are printed on.
------------------

This column first appeared in Jose A. Carillo’s “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times on March 29, 2004. The author is presenting the essay in retrospective to help contextualize the intense propaganda buildup today to destabilize the current government and start another round of changes in the country’s charter to benefit particular political interests.     

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Retrospective on political propaganda

(Next: The strength of materials and people’s folly)          February 8, 2024
                                                                                              
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
39
Site Announcements / Retrospective of 12 of Jose Carillo’s Personal Essays (2003-2023)
« Last post by Joe Carillo on January 29, 2024, 09:17:45 AM »
January 28, 2024

Dear Forum Member and Friend,

We are pleased to announce that for this first quarter of 2024, the Jose Carillo Forum Homepage is featuring a retrospective of 12 of Jose Carillo’s personal essays written for his English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently posted in the Forum during the 20-year period from 2003 to 2023.


The 12 personal essays, each viewable by clicking their indicated web links, are as follows:
 
1. A World Without English
2. The Grammar of Manners
3. English in a Used Jar
4. Do Kingfishers Eat Butter?
5. The Tree of Life
6. Indignities in American Minor
7. How I Discovered Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. Rediscovering John Galsworthy: “The Apple Tree”
9. The Roots of English
10. The Evil That Ignorance and Incompetence Can Do
11. Matters of Faith
12. The Real Score About Valentine’s Day

These essays are likewise directly viewable from the Jose Carillo Forum Homepage at https://josecarilloforum.com/.

We trust that you’ll find these 12 essays enjoyable reading or re-reading as well as instructive about the power of English in communicating our thoughts and ideas and in expressing our feelings.

With our best wishes,
Joe Carillo
40
Lounge / 30 finalists for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle awards announced
« Last post by Joe Carillo on January 26, 2024, 06:01:07 PM »
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) in the United States has formally announced 30 finalists for publishing year 2023 in six awards categories--autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, general nonfiction, and poetry. The awards will be presented in formal ceremonies on March 21, 2024 at The New School in New York City on 66 West 12th Street, New York.

For 2023, the National Book Critics Circle in the U.S. has announced 30 finalists in six categories

The finalists for the NBCC awards for publishing year are as follows:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
Susan Kiyo Ito, I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir (The Ohio State University Press)
David Mas Masumoto, with artwork by Patricia Wakida, Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (Red Hen Press)
Ahmed Naji, Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison, translated by Katharine Halls (McSweeney’s)
Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster)
Matthew Zapruder, Story of a Poem: A Memoir (Unnamed Press)

BIOGRAPHY:
Jonathan Eig, King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Gregg Hecimovich, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative (Ecco)
Yunte Huang, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History (Liveright)
Rachel Shteir, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disruptor (Yale University Press)
Jonny Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Knopf)

CRITICISM:
Nicholas Dames, The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press)
Myriam Gurba, Creep: Accusations and Confessions (Avid Reader Press)
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Grace E. Lavery, Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton University Press)
Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press)

FICTION:
Teju Cole, Tremor (Random House)
Daniel Mason, North Woods (Random House)
Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home (Knopf)
Marie NDiaye, Vengeance Is Mine, translated by Jordan Stump (Knopf)
Justin Torres, Blackouts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

NONFICTION:
Roxanna Asgarian, We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs (Knopf)
Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (W. W. Norton)
Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn’t Enough (Catapult Books)

POETRY:
Saskia Hamilton, All Souls (Graywolf Press)
Kim Hyesoon, Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi (New Directions)
Romeo Oriogun, The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press)
Robyn Schiff, Information Desk (Penguin Books)
Charif Shanahan, Trace Evidence (Tin House)

GREGG BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE:
Kareem Abdulrahman’s translation of The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali (Archipelago Books)
Natascha Bruce’s translation of Owlish by Dorothy Tse (Graywolf Press)
Don Mee Choi’s translation of Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon (New Directions)
Todd Fredson’s translation of Zakwato & Loglêdou’s Peril by Azo Vauguy (Action Books)
Maureen Freely’s translation of Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü (Transit Books)
Tiffany Tsao’s translation of Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (Feminist Press)

JOHN LEONARD PRIZE:
Ariana Benson, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press)
Emilie Boone, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Duke University Press)
Victor Heringer, The Love of Singular Men, translated by James Young (New Directions)
Tahir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: a Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)
Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King (One World)
Martin J. Siegel, Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs (Cornell University Press)

NBCC SERVICE AWARD:
Marion Winik

NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING:
Becca Rothfeld

Finalists:
Rhoda Feng
Christoph Irmscher
Sophie Pinkham
Audrey Wollen

TONI MORRISON ACHIEVEMENT AWARD:
American Library Association

IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD:
Judy Blume

Read the full NBCC awards announcement in the BookCritics.org website now!
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