The finalists for each of the four National Book Award categories were announced Wednesday morning on NPR’s Morning Edition. The winners will be named on November 18. The fiction list gives Booker bettors’-favorite Hanya Yanagihara another chance at a major award, along with recently-named 5 Under 35 honoree Angela Flournoy.
Fiction
Karen E. Bender, Refund (Counterpoint)
Angela Flournoy, The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies (Riverhead)
Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles (Random House)
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (Doubleday)
Nonfiction
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau)
Sally Mann, Hold Still (Little, Brown)
Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus (Atria)
Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink (Henry Holt)
Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light: A Memoir (Knopf)
Young People’s Literature
The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin (Little, Brown Children’s)
Bone Gap by Laura Ruby (Balzer + Bray)
Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War by Steve Sheinkin (Roaring Brook Press)
Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman (Harper Children’s)
Nimona by Noelle Stevenson (HarperTeen)
Poetry
Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press )
Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (Penguin)
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf)
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions)
Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)