The National Book Awards moved up the announcement of their finalists to Thursday (after originally planning to release the news next Thursday) — which will keep these lists from getting overshadowed by the naming of the Nobel laureate for literature on October 13.
Fiction
Chris Bachelder, The Throwback Special (Norton)
Paulette Jiles, News of the World (William Morrow)
Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking)
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday)
Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn (Amistad)
Nonfiction
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land (The New Press)
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning (Nation Books)
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Harvard University Press)
Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water (Pantheon)
Young People’s Literature
Kate DiCamillo, Raymie Nightingale (Candlewick Press)
John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (Artist) March: Book Three (Top Shelf)
Grace Lin, When the Sea Turned to Silver (Little, Brown Children’s)
Jason Reynolds, Ghost (Atheneum)
Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also A Star (Delacorte Press)
Poetry
Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press)
Rita Dove, Collected Poems 1974 – 2004 (Norton)
Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press)
Jay Hopler, The Abridged History of Rainfall (McSweeney’s; not yet released)
Solmaz Sharif, Look (Graywolf)