According to the Washington Post, two new Civil War/Reconstruction Era books have been Longlisted for the National Book Awards this year. Night Watch is a novel and “I Saw Death Coming” is a history. The text under the titles of the books comes from the Washington Post.
‘Night Watch’ by Jayne Anne Phillips
“The lasting damage inflicted by war has preoccupied Jayne Anne Phillips’s fiction since her first novel, ‘Machine Dreams,’ which came out nearly 40 years ago,” notes Wendy Smith in her Post review. “In that debut, she grappled with World War II and Vietnam, then with Korea in ‘Lark and Termite’ (2009). Now she turns her attention to the Civil War in the beautiful, mournful ‘Night Watch.’”
‘I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction’ by Kidada E. Williams
Williams reframes the Reconstruction era of American history, challenging the narrative of “failure” and considering it instead as a “war on freedom” for Black people. “What is most powerful here is not the forensic analysis of the violence, though it is devastating, but the way Williams conveys the experience of the victims,” Stephanie McCurry wrote in The Post.
