It’s officially fall, so that means it’s officially book award season, and nothing marks its advent like naming the National Book Award finalists. Winners will be announced in New York City on November 15.
The short list is headlined by Jesmyn Ward, whose Sing, Unburied, Sing appeared in two recent essays on our site. Four of the five Fiction finalists made appearances 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 Leavers by Lisa Ko (excerpt; A Most Anticipated Book)
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (People Without a Home: On Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko; A Most Anticipated Book)
- Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado (A Most Anticipated Book)
- Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Literature’s Inherited Trauma: On Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing; Searching for Complexity: Motherhood in Fiction; A Most Anticipated Book)
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)
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (Surviving Trump: Masha Gessen Wants You to Remember the Future)
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (excerpt)
- Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean (Surviving Koch: Nancy MacLean Wants You to Ignore Donald Trump)
Poetry:
- Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart (The Poet and the Movie Star: An Evening with Frank Bidart and James Franco)
- The Book of Endings by Leslie Harrison
- WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier (Start With These Five New Books of Poetry)
- In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
- Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith (The Nu-Audacity School of Poetry)
Young People’s Literature:
- What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold
- Far from the Tree by Robin Benway (excerpt)
- I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez (excerpt)
- Clayton Byrd Goes Underground by Rita Williams-Garcia (excerpt)
- American Street by Ibi Zoboi (excerpt)
