NEW YORK – A book of essays by actor Lili Taylor, a memoir by restaurateur Keith McNally and a bestseller from Andrew Ross Sorkin about the stock market crash that helped lead to the Great Depression are among the 11 finalists for a $50,000 literary prize.
The Gotham Book Prize, launched in 2020 by bookstore owner-philanthropist Bradley Tusk and political strategist Howard Wolfson, honors fiction or nonfiction about New York City.
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Each of the 11 nominated books touch upon a different facet of New York, whether Taylor's love for quiet moments and the outdoors in “Turning to Birds,” the dining life in McNally's “I Regret Almost Everything” or the panic on Wall Street in Sorkin's “1929.”
Finalists also include Mark Ronson's memoir, “Night People: How to Be a DJ in '90s New York City”; Adam Ross' novel of the city in the 1980s, “Playworld”; and a novel centered on the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, Victoria Christopher Murray's “Harlem Rhapsody.”
“It’s clearer than ever that our city is an object of fascination and the ideal setting for countless books, both fiction and nonfiction,” Tusk and Wolfson said in a statement Tuesday. “When great writers focus on New York City, that maintains our status as the place that the best and brightest from all of the world want to be.”
The winner will be announced in the spring. Previous Gotham prize recipients include Colson Whitehead's novel, “Crook Manifesto,” and Andrea Elliott's investigative “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.”
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This story corrects that there are 11 nominated books, not 10.