Nevada Reads 2020
Throughout 2020, Nevada Reads featured two books—one nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, and one novel, Severance by Ling Ma. Nomadland is the true story about an emerging group of itinerant workers, who in most cases, have fallen out of the middle class and are traveling across the country in RVs and motorhomes, working low-paying temporary jobs. Calling themselves "houseless" instead of "homeless," Nomadland is a story of American resilience, as well as an indictment on a broken economic system and its disappearing social safety net. Severance also investigates capitalism and transience, but via the lens of a zombie apocalypse, offering a satirical look at worker alienation amongst a younger generation.
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder
W. W. Norton & Company
For her book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Bruder spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in a precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving—from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border. Named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice, Nomadland won the 2017 Discover Award and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award. Jessica Bruder has been teaching narrative storytelling at Columbia Journalism School and contributing to The New York Times for more than a decade. She has also written for New York Magazine, WIRED, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, and The Guardian. She is the author of Burning Book and is currently writing about trust in the age of surveillance. She lives in Brooklyn with a dog named Max and more plants than you can shake a leafy stick at.
Severance by Ling Ma
Picador
Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So much so, that she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, Candance photographs the eerie, abandoned city as an anonymous blogger. A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive. Severance won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. Ling Ma was born in Sanming, China, and she grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. She attended the University of Chicago and received an MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a journalist and an editor. Her writing has appeared in Granta, VICE, Playboy, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, and other publications. A chapter of Severance received the 2015 Graywolf SLS Prize. She lives in Chicago.
