Finalists were named Wednesday morning for the National Book Awards, with the winners to be named on November 14. The fiction nominees including two story collections (Brinkley and Groff), and three titles from Penguin Random House imprints versus two small press candidates. Among the more prominent omissions from the longlist as Tommy Orange’s debut There, There and Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage.
Fiction Nominees
Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man (Graywolf Press)
Lauren Groff, Florida (Riverhead)
Brandon Hobson, Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press)
Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (Viking)
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (Riverhead)
Nonfiction Nominees
Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington (Oxford University Press)
Victoria Johnson, American Eden (Liveright)
Sarah Smarsh, Heartland (Scribner)
Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro (Oxford University Press)
Adam Winkler, We the Corporations (Liveright)
Translated Literature Nominees
Negar Djavadi, Disoriental, Translated by Tina Kover (Europa Editions)
Hanne Orstavik, Love, Translated by Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books)
Domenico Starnone, Trick, Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions)
Yoko Tawada, The Emissary, Translated by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions Publishing)
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, Translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead)
Tokarczuk won the Booker International prize earlier this year.
Young People’s Literature Nominees
Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X (Harper Teen)
M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge (Candlewick Press)
Leslie Connor, The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle (Katherine Tegen Books)
Christopher Paul Curtis, The Journey of Little Charlie (Scholastic Press)
Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Hey, Kiddo (Graphix)
M.T. Anderson previously won prize in 2006 for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.
Poetry Nominees:
Rae Armantrout, Wobble (Wesleyan University Press)
Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books)
Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing)
Justin Phillip Reed, Indecency (Coffee House Press)
Jenny Xie, Eye Level (Graywolf Press)