The history of US voter suppression, the lives of American Indians, the escape of enslaved Yazidi women: These make up the cheerful topics for this year’s US National Book Award longlist, announced today. The foundation will announce the finalists on Oct. 10 and the winners on Nov. 14.
This is the first year for the newly announced category for works in translation, whose longlist includes Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, which won the Man Booker International Prize this year.
Here are all the longlisted books:
Fiction
- A Lucky Man, by Jamel Brinkley
- Gun Love, by Jennifer Clement
- Florida, by Lauren Groff
- The Boatbuilder, by Daniel Gumbiner
- Where the Dead Sit Talking, by Brandon Hobson
- An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones
- The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
- The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez
- There There, by Tommy Orange
- Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Nonfiction
- 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
- 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
Poetry
- Wobble, by Rae Armantrout
- feeld, by Jos Charles
- Be with, by Forrest Gander
- American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, by Terrance Hayes
- 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
Literature in translation
- Disoriental, by Négar Djavadi, translated by Tina Kover
- Comemadre, by Roque Larraquy, translated by Heather Cleary
- The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq, by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Dunya Mikhail and Max Weiss
- 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
- The Emissary, by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
- Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
- Aetherial Worlds, by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated by Anya Migdal
Young people’s literature
- The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo
- The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin
- 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