Features

Beth Macy, author of Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. But as her mother’s health declined in 2020, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community’s civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. This was not an assignment Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother’s death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the 40 years since she’d left. The result is an astonishing book that brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues.

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The National Book Critics Circle Awards 2025

The longlists for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced in six categories --- Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry --- as well as the longlist for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize,

The finalists will be announced on January 20th, along with the finalists for the John Leonard Prize (for the best first book in any genre) and the honorees for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Toni Morrison Achievement Award. The National Book Critics Circle Awards will be presented on March 26th at the New School in New York City.

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