And just like that book award season is back! The National Book Foundation announced the National Book Award longlist this week on the New Yorker‘s Page Turner section. Each containing ten books, the five longlists are fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young people’s literature, and, the newly minted, translated literature. The five-title shortlists will be announced on October 10th and the awards will be revealed in New York City (and streamed online) on November 14.
Some fun facts about these nominees:
- The Fiction list only contains one previous nominee (Lauren Groff).
- All of the Nonfiction nominees are first-time contenders for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
- The Poetry list include one previous winner (Terrance Hayes), one previous finalist (Rae Armantrout), and eight first-time nominees—three of which are for debut collections (Diana Khoi Nguyen, Justin Phillip Reed, and Jenny Xie).
- 2018 is the first year of the Translated Literature category so all nominees are first-time contenders for this award.
Here’s a list of the finalists in all five categories with bonus links where available:
Fiction:
- A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Our interview with Brinkley; Brinkley’s 2017 Year in Reading)
- Gun Love by Jennifer Clement
- Florida by Lauren Groff (Our review; The Millions interview with Groff)
- The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner
- Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson (Featured in our February Book Preview)
- An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (Jones’s 2017 Year in Reading)
- The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Our interview with Makkai)
- The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Nunez’s 2010 Year in Reading)
- There There by Tommy Orange (Featured in our June Book Preview)
- Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Featured in our April Book Preview)
- One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson
- The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation by Colin G. Calloway
- Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll
- Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple
- American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson
- The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen
- Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh (Smarsh’s 2017 Year in Reading)
- Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit
- The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
- We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler
- Wobble by Rae Armantrout
- feeld by Jos Charles (ft. in our August Must-Read Poetry preview)
- Be With by Forrest Gander
- American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Our review)
- Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez
- Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen
- Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed
- lo terciario / the tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera
- Monument: Poems New and Selected by Natasha Trethewey
- Eye Level by Jenny Xie (ft. in our April Must-Read Poetry preview)
- Disoriental by Négar Djavadi; translated by Tina Kover (Featured in our 2018 Great Book Preview)
- Comemadre by Roque Larraquy; translated by Heather Cleary (Featured in our Second-Half 2018 Great Book Preview)
- The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail; translated by Max Weiss and Dunya Mikhail
- One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan; translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
- Love by Hanne Ørstavik; translated by Martin Aitken
- Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life by Gunnhild Øyehaug; translated by Kari Dickson
- Trick by Domenico Starnone; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (An essay on learning new languages)
- The Emissary by Yoko Tawada; translated by Margaret Mitsutani (Tawada’s 2017 Year in Reading)
- Flights by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Jennifer Croft (Our review; 2018 Man Booker International Prize)
- Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya; translated by Anya Migdal
- The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
- The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin (Our three-part conversation from 2009 with Anderson)
- We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss
- The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor
- The Journey of Little Charlie by Christopher Paul Curtis
- Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
- A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi
- Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough
- Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam by Elizabeth Partridge
- What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper