Book award season enters high gear as the National Book Award finalists have been released in a series of four longlists consisting of ten books apiece. Five finalists in each category will be announced on October 4, and winners will be announced in New York City on November 15.
The fiction list includes an eclectic mix and features eight women, including Jennifer Egan for her long-awaited new novel.
You read about nearly all of the books on the Fiction longlist here first, of course, as they appeared in our indispensable first-half and second-half previews.
Here’s a list of the finalists in all four categories with bonus links and excerpts where available:
Fiction:
- Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman(excerpt)
- The King Is Always Above the People: Stories by Daniel Alarcón
- Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig (excerpt)
- Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (Egan’s Year in Reading)
- The Leavers by Lisa Ko (excerpt)
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (People Without a Home: On Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko)
- Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
- A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (excerpt)
- Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (“Haunted by Ghosts: The Millions Interviews Jesmyn Ward“, “Literature’s Inherited Trauma: On Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing“)
- Barren Island by Carol Zoref
Nonfiction:
- Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (excerpt)
- The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald (excerpt)
- Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman, Jr. (excerpt)
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (read our interview with Gessen)
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I. by David Grann (excerpt)
- No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein (excerpt)
- Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean (read our interview with MacLean)
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (excerpt)
- The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson (excerpt)
- Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young
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Poetry:
- Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart
- When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
- The Book of Endings by Leslie Harrison
- Magdalene by Marie Howe
- Where Now: New and Selected Poems by Laura Kasischke
- Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Nick Ripatrazone on Layli Long Soldier)
- In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
- Square Inch Hours by Sherod Santos
- Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (Nick Ripatrazone on Danez Smith; excerpt)
- Afterland by Mai Der Vang
Young People’s Literature:
- What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold
- Far from the Tree by Robin Benway
- All the Wind in the World by Samantha Mabry
- You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins
- Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
- I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez
- Orphan Island by Laurel Snyder
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (excerpt)
- Clayton Byrd Goes Underground by Rita Williams-Garcia
- American Street by Ibi Zoboi
