Subscribe to our newsletter
Science + Literature
The Science + Literature program identifies three books annually, steered by a committee of scientific and literary experts, to deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology with a focus on work that highlights the diversity of voices in scientific writing. The selected titles act as a catalyst to create discourse, understanding, and engagement with science for communities across the country. Authors receive a $10,000 prize, are celebrated at a public ceremony in New York, and feature in national public programming.
Each spring, the National Book Foundation invites a growing list of science, technology, and literary professionals across the country to make recommendations in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry rooted in real science or technology research or practices. Eligible books must have been published in English by publishers based in the United States within the last three years, and authors must maintain their primary, long-term home in the United States, US territories, or Tribal lands, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Committee selections are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors.
To suggest a title, email Production Manager Emily Lovett at elovett@nationalbook.org. Please include a PDF review copy and publicist contact information within your email.
Science + Literature is made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature reveals how science can serve as a refuge, a truth, and a means of survival. Mycologist Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian chronicles for readers the ways that fungi, forests, and fieldwork turned out to be her partners in healing from trauma and in navigating the nuances of race and gender in a world insisting on binaries. This is a remarkable, urgently needed book—one which offers readers curiosity, comfort, and belonging.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.
In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as 23,000. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is the curator of mycology at the New York State Museum, as well as faculty with the Bard Prison Initiative. Kaishian earned her PhD from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
GET THIS BOOK:
by Anna North
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Bog Queen beautifully intertwines ancient wisdom of druids and moss with the analytical insights of a forensic anthropologist. With assured and propulsive prose, Anna North writes about the entangled interests and histories of the bog with a sweeping cast of characters, both human and non-human. Bog Queen is an essential read in thinking about our relationship with the land, the past, what counts as science, how we measure rigor, and how we might move forward.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she’s ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.
Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past, called to understand and avenge the death of an Iron Age woman more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with peat-cutters who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Then there’s the moss itself: a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.
As Agnes faces the deep history of what she has unearthed, she’s also forced to question what she thought she knew about her talent, her self-reliance, and her place in the world. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with contemporary urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Anna North is the author of the novels America Pacifica, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, and Outlawed, which was an instant New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick. She is also a senior correspondent at Vox. Her most recent novel, Bog Queen, was a national bestseller.
GET THIS BOOK:
by Claire Wahmanholm
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Meltwater is a collection of poetry that powerfully expresses what it feels like to live, love, and mother during a time of climate chaos. Throughout, Claire Wahmanholm creates free verse, serial structures, prose poems, and erasures to create an aesthetic diversity that embodies the biodiversity that our planet is sadly losing. Woven into the poems is a wealth of environmental knowledge, multispecies assemblages, and climate data. This book brings together literature and science in a way that is innovative, emotive, and compelling.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
“Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly?
Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”
If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder, Redmouth, and, most recently, Meltwater, which was a finalist for the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2024 Minnesota Book Award. A 2020 McKnight Writer Fellow, and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize, she lives in the Twin Cities.
GET THIS BOOK:
by Ed Yong
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us challenges readers to regard the world through different eyes—not to mention sensory hairs, electroreceptors, and lyriform organs. It is an exemplary work of science writing—prodigiously reported, sharply crafted, and packed with information. Like all the best works of nonfiction, An Immense World is rigorously grounded in fact and, at the same time, invites us all to be open to the great mysteries of life.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.
In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer based in Oakland. He is the author of two bestselling books: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. He was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a member of Liminal—a science communication collective, co-founded by his wife Liz Neeley. He has a corgi named Typo.
GET THIS BOOK:
by Arthur Sze
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Spanning 50 years and 11 books, The Glass Constellation confirms Arthur Sze’s reputation as a contemporary master. It also offers readers an overview of his unique approach to science writing. Sze is a cosmologist whose poems blend Chinese Buddhist, American indigenous, and Western scientific worldviews to produce meditations on simultaneity and the intricately patterned fabric of the real. Yoking the earth-bound and the heavenly, full of cosmic wonder, his individual lyrics and ambitious sequences balance a love of beauty and formal equipoise with an acknowledgement of violence and chance. A meticulous craftsperson, Sze honors the poignance of each moment we share while on earth by finding forms that capture what he calls ‘the unrepeatable contour of this breath.'”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
National Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, comprising ten previous poetry collections and 26 new poems. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions—employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target and deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species—Arthur Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in book after indelible book. This collection is a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Arthur Sze has published 11 books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems and Sight Lines, which won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. A new collection, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry, is forthcoming. Sze is the recipient of many honors, including a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a 2021 Shelley Memorial Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize. He is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
GET THIS BOOK:
by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Digging Stars spans generations and continents to tell the intensely personal story of Athandwa, an astrophysicist navigating grief, mental health challenges, and the politics of practicing science. Through a vivid cast of characters, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma asks fundamental questions about the scientific enterprise and eschews simple answers, instead revealing an underlying complexity, deeply entwined with the social context in which science is practiced. Athandwa’s sharp wit and love of the night sky suffuses the novel with a sense of wonder.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
With admission to The Program, an elite interdisciplinary graduate cohort at the forefront of astronomy and technology, Rosa’s dreams are finally within reach. Her research into the cosmos follows in the footsteps of her astronomer father’s revolutionary work in Bantu geometries and Indigenous astronomies. A bona fide genius, he transformed the scientific landscape by fusing the best of Western and Indigenous scientific thought. Yet since his death during her childhood, Rosa has been plagued by anxiety attacks she dubs “The Terrors”—and by unresolved questions about her father’s life. Who is his mysterious friend Mr. C? Who was her father, really?
Digging Stars is a paean to the cosmos and a celebration of the democratic spirit of knowledge. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s characters explode the rigid matrices of the academy to prove that science, art, technology, and history are all planets orbiting the same sun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s latest novel is Digging Stars. Her first novel, House of Stone, won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Balcones Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, Tshuma has taught graduate fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at Emerson College.
GET THIS BOOK:
by Brandon Taylor
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Real Life presents important questions of navigating society and a world of whiteness in the pursuit of a career in science, while also managing the heavy expectations of color, individual expression, community, and family. This novel should hit close to home for any BIPOC academic in science (or not) who struggles in a tower that is often too ivory—and more times than not, unprepared to deal with difference. Taylor’s work is personally riveting and atmospheric. The dialogue never tires. The scenes are dynamic and well-paced. It is timely and highly recommended reading for all.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brandon Taylor is the author of Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and of the national bestseller Filthy Animals, which won The Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.
GET THIS BOOK
by Xiaowei R. Wang
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Amidst the growing demand to better understand the social implications of digital technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm stands out as a culturally sensitive and original contribution. Xiaowei Wang offers a rare and enlightened window into the globalization of rural China and deftly explores how the applied science of modern machinery, of artificial intelligence, is deeply intertwined with people, places, and politics. Each essay in this plucky collection asks urgent questions about our humanity and communal future, shaped now by the rapid rise of tech in seemingly unlikely places.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Xiaowei R. Wang is a technologist, a filmmaker, an artist, and a writer. The creative director at Logic magazine, their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the INDEX Design Awards and featured by the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. They are working toward a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where they are a part of the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship, “Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century.”
GET THIS BOOK
by Linda Hogan
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Linda Hogan’s collection The Radiant Lives of Animals is a brilliant evocation of the infinite ways in which the subjects of nature shape human perception and being. In both verse and prose, Hogan draws on Native ways of seeing the biological, the botanical, the geological, and the cosmological that have long been sidelined or suppressed, offering readers a heartrending glimpse of the beauty of the wild world and the trauma of its destruction.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Concerned that human lives and the natural world are too often defined by people who are separated from the land and its inhabitants, Indigenous writer and environmentalist Linda Hogan depicts her own intense relationships with animals as an example we all can follow to heal our souls and reconnect with the spirit of the world. In this illuminating collection of essays and poems, lightly sprinkled with elegant drawings, Hogan draws on many Native nations’ ancient stories and spiritual traditions to show us that the soul exists in those delicate places where the natural world extends into human consciousness—in the midst of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight. Altogether, this beautifully packaged gift is a reverential reminder for us all to witness and appreciate the radiant lives of animals. —in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight. Altogether, this beautifully packaged gift is a reverential reminder for all of us to witness and appreciate the radiant lives of animals.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is a poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, and activist. Her work illuminates environmental and Indigenous activism, as well as Native spirituality. She was born in Oklahoma and now lives and works in Idledale, Colorado, a town of 252 human souls. Her literary works have earned her fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, and awards including the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas’ Lifetime Achievement Award and the Henry David Thoreau Prize.
GET THIS BOOK
by Rachel Pastan
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“In vivid, well-crafted prose, Rachel Pastan’s novel In the Field brings us into the professional and private life of a dedicated female geneticist, born in the 1920s, whose challenges and sacrifices illustrate how science, far from being impersonal, is practiced by people—how the pursuit of knowledge is shaped by the social norms and preconceptions that limit our behavior as individuals, and delay the acceptance of new ideas by the scientific community.”
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
In 1923, having persuaded her resistant mother to send her to college, Kate Croft falls in love with science. Painfully rebuffed by a girl she longs for, and in flight from her own confusing sexuality, Kate finds refuge in the calm rationality of biology: its vision of a deeply interconnected world, and the promise that the new field of genetics can explain the way people are.
But science, too, turns out to be marred by human weakness. Despite her hard work and extraordinary gifts, Kate struggles, facing discrimination, competition, and scientific theft. At the same time, a love affair is threatened by Kate’s obsession with figuring out the meaning of the puzzling changes she sees in her experiments. The novel explores what it takes to triumph in the ruthless world of mid-20th-century genetics, following Kate as she decides what she is—and is not—willing to sacrifice to succeed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rachel Pastan is the author of four novels, most recently In the Field. Her previous novel, Alena, was named an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review. The daughter of a molecular geneticist and a poet, she has worked as editor-at-large at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and taught fiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars, Swarthmore College, and elsewhere.
GET THIS BOOK
no content
