Stranger Faces a Finalist for NBCC Award

On Sunday, January 24, the board of the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2020 award, which included Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell for Criticism. This is the second year that a Transit author has been named a finalist in that category. Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin was shortlisted for the 2019 award.

Other titles nominated for Criticism this year include Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard Univ. Press), Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press), Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Wendy A. Woloson, Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (Univ. of Chicago Press).

The winners will be announced in a virtual ceremony on March 25.

About Stranger Faces

If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call "humanity." The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face.

What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.

Stranger Faces is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.