2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist
Gone by Lee Ann Smith (a Short Story Contest entry)
Candle stubs flicker on the table, wax dripping. A bottle of Cabernet stands open by one of the two place settings. A wine glass lays on the tablecloth, its contents spreading, deep blood red. In the kitchen, an alarm blares as smoke billows from the oven.
We made it look sudden, violent, unexpected. When the fire department shows up, they’ll call the police. We’ll be miles away. We knew this day would come.
She was beautiful and kind the way you want your friends to be. We were inseparable. I followed her everywhere. I used to think that she was an angel sent to be my friend.
“Then where are my wings?” she would say with a laugh.
My family moved away and I lost contact with her.
Until my twenty-first birthday when I received seven long white feathers in the mail.
Candle stubs flicker on the table, wax dripping. A bottle of Cabernet stands open by one of the two place settings. A wine glass lays on the tablecloth, its contents spreading, deep blood red. In the kitchen, an alarm blares as smoke billows from the oven.
We made it look sudden, violent, unexpected. When the fire department shows up, they’ll call the police. We’ll be miles away. We knew this day would come.
Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison's body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. It turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only sad return home to broken lives.
Bill Clegg returns with a deeply moving, emotionally resonant novel about the complicated bonds and breaking points of female friendship, the corrosive forces of secrets, the heartbeat of longing, and the redemption found in forgiveness.
Arsenault reflects on her serene hometown and the cloaked environmental corruption plaguing it. The author, a National Books Critics Circle board member and book review editor at Orion, grew up in Mexico, Maine, a small town fortified by the Androscoggin River. She writes poignantly of growing up in a large nuclear family surrounded by the town’s dense forestlands. Her father and grandfather worked at the local paper mill, an entity that economically grounded the town and employed a large percentage of its residents, many of whom remained blind to the ever changing world around them.
The former U.S. poet laureate shares a personal memoir about the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and how this profound experience of loss shaped her as an adult and an artist.
Franny Stone cannot be contained. In a bleak near-future, she is a wanderer and a sleepwalker, a swimmer and a bird lover. Born in Australia, raised in Ireland by her mother while knowing nothing of her father, she ends up back in Australia with her paternal grandmother. Returning as an adult to Ireland, she works as a cleaner at a university, where Niall Lynch, a famous professor of ornithology, willingly succumbs to her dangerous bewitchment. Their shared ardor for the wild turns tragic as the sixth extinction accelerates.
Struggling to adjust to small-town life after having a baby, an accomplished New York City journalist immerses herself in social media before bonding with a babysitter from a very different walk of life.