Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation

Brandy McDonnell is a winner of the 2025 Rabkin Prize. She travels the state of Oklahoma covering the arts and writes from her home office in Lindsay, near where she grew up. Our Rabkin Interview with Brandy drops on Wednesday.

To read more about Brandy, an award-winning features journalist for The Oklahoman, visit her bio page at our website and subscribe to the Rabkin Interviews on our Substack. Both can be found at our link in bio.

The commissioned portraits of this year’s winners in the spaces where they work are by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki. 

We asked Rabkin Prize winners to share their best reads of 2024. Here’s what Amanda Fortini, a 2020 awardee, recommends: 

This year, I steeped and re-steeped myself in the literature of Las Vegas (“Air Guitar,” by Dave Hickey; “Learning From Las Vegas,” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour; “Fear and Loathing” by Hunter S. Thompson) for the nonfiction book I’m writing about the city. I also revisited Gretel Ehrlich’s “The Solace of Open Spaces” (Viking Penguin Inc, 1985), her seminal essay collection about Wyoming. To my mind, the book is a model for anyone writing about place.

Among the recreational reading I did, Dorothy Baker’s “Cassandra at the Wedding” (Victor Gollancz, 1962), reprinted by NYRB Classics in 2004 and 2012, stands out. It’s the most original novel I’ve read in ages, with an afterword by the great Deborah Eisenberg. The story follows the charming, brilliant, but reckless 24-year-old Cassandra over one summer weekend as she returns to the hothouse environment of her family’s ranch for her twin sister Judith’s wedding. Let’s just say chaos ensues. Someone on social media affectionately called it a “staple crazy girl book” – a genre of which I count myself a superfan. Another favorite, Mary Gaitskill’s short story collection, “Bad Behavior” (Poseidon Press, 1988), belongs to a subset of the category: the naughty-young-woman novel. To her readers’ immense delight, Gaitskill has been writing essays of late; this summer, in Granta, she published “The Pneuma Illusion,” an uncanny piece about the vagaries of healing and the often messy dynamic between patient and practitioner. 

A latecomer to my list is Greg Gerke’s “The Response to Art is Everything,” published last month in Liberties (where a harrowing 2023 essay by Gaitskill, “The Trials of the Young: A Semester,” about the despair she witnessed among students she taught, also appeared). Art, Gerke argues, “makes” us, becoming “a part of our consciousness’ stream,” changing our very perceptions – as all these works have done for me. “Artworks don’t want to be solved,” Gerke writes, “They want to be lived in.” Yes.

Link in bio for more A Year in Reading recommendations.