Book award season is peaking along with the autumn leaves as the National Book Award shortlists have been released in four categories. These have been whittled down from last month’s longlists, and the winners will be announced in New York City on November 19.
As we mentioned when she landed on the longlist, one of the fiction finalists will be especially familiar to Millions readers. Emily St. John Mandel, whose Station Eleven has been winning high praise, has been a staff writer for us since 2009. We’ll again point you to her first piece for us: “Working the Double Shift” examined how many writers must write as a “second career” while a day job pays the bills.
You read about nearly all of the books on the Fiction longlist here first, 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:
- An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (excerpt)
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Doerr’s Year in Reading, 2010)
- Redeployment by Phil Klay (excerpt)
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Mandel’s Millions archive)
- Lila by Marilynne Robinson (excerpt)
Nonfiction:
- Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast (excerpt)
- No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal (excerpt)
- Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr (excerpt)
- Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos (excerpt)
- The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
Poetry:
- Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück (review)
- Second Childhood by Fanny Howe (review)
- This Blue by Maureen N. McLane (review)
- The Feel Trio by Fred Moten (excerpt)
- Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (excerpt)
Young People’s Literature:
- Threatened by Eliot Schrefer
- The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin (excerpt)
- Noggin by John Corey Whaley (excerpt)
- Revolution: The Sixties Trilogy, Book Two by Deborah Wiles
- Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (excerpt)
