Top of page

Archive: July 2024 (5 Posts)

James McBride poses with chin in hand. He's wearing a blue beret, blue turtleneck and gray sweater with a hoop earring in his left ear.

James McBride Awarded the 2024 Prize for American Fiction

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

The Library will award the 2024 Prize for American Fiction to novelist and author James McBride, Librarian Carla Hayden announced today. McBride, 66, is the author of the hugely popular memoir "The Color of Water," novels such as “The Good Lord Bird” (winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction) and, most recently "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store," which received the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was named Barnes and Noble’s 2023 Book of the Year. In 2016, he was awarded the the National Humanities Medal. He will be awarded the Prize for Fiction at the 2024 National Book Festival.

Folklorist Sidney Robertson and Her “California Gold”

Posted by: Neely Tucker

The folklorist Sidney Robertson was one of the trailblazing American women of the 1930s and 1940s, the kind of life you’d associate with Martha Gellhorn, Dorothea Lange or Zora Neale Hurston. Her work directing the California Folk Music Project from 1938-40 is the subject "California Gold," a new book from the Library and the University of California Press.

A woman with sterile rubber gloves leans over a turntable to place a needle on a record.

Saving the Sounds of History

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

The Library's custom-designed multitracking studio at National Audio-Visual Conservation Center was built to house and preserve the collections of guitarist and audio-engineering innovator Les Paul. But it's also used to convert, preserve and save recordings made on formats that may not last. It's one of several labs that use cutting-edge technology to save the nation's recorded sound history.