Today in Bookish and Literary History, October 3

1997 Underworld by Don DeLillo

The novel is centered on the efforts of Nick Shay, a waste management executive who grew up in the Bronx, to trace the history of the baseball that won the New York Giants the pennant in 1951, and encompasses numerous subplots drawn from American history in the second half of the twentieth century.

• Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
• Finalist for the National Book Award
• Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
• Winner of the Howell’s Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

2013 The Forward Book of Poetry 2014 by Jeanette Winterson (UK)

The Forward Book of Poetry showcases the best of contemporary poetry published in the British Isles over the last year, including the winners of 2013's hotly contested Forward Poetry Prizes.

2019 Grand Union by Zadie Smith (UK)

In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world.

• Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal

2023 Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

It describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. A journey that is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, the novel is “[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours.”

2023 Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend .

• shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize

2023 Company: Stories by Shannon Sanders

A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family

• Winner of The 2023 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
• Shortlisted for The 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing

2023 Anamnesis by Iona Lee (UK)

Humorous and self-aware, gentle and philosophical, Anamnesis is written in the knowledge that in telling one's life-story, one creates it.

2024 The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale (UK)

In March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartment, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

• Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction
• Winner of the 2025 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction