The National Book Awards announced their finalists, with winners to be named on November 18. Everyone who wins this year will be a first-time honoree, since none of the authors has been a finalist previously. Douglas Stuart remains in contention for both the National Book Award for fiction as well as the Booker Prize.
The biggest publishers are thoroughly under-represented this year, publishing only two of the fiction nominees, one of the nonfiction candidates, none of the poetry finalists, and two of the translated literature titles.
Fiction
Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind (Ecco)
Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible (Norton)
Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press)
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (Grove Press)
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown (Pantheon)
Nonfiction
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans (One World)
Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright)
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (Norton)
Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House Books)
Jerald Walker, How to Make a Slave and Other Essays (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press)
Young Adult
Kacen Callender, King and the Dragonflies (Scholastic Press)
Traci Chee, We Are Not Free (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s)
Candice Iloh, Every Body Looking (Dutton Children’s)
Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, When Stars Are Scattered (Dial)
Gavriel Savit, The Way Back (Knopf Children’s)
Poetry
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars (New Directions)
Tommye Blount, Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books)
Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony (Wave Books)
Anthony Cody, Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn Publishing)
Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf)
Translated Literature
Anja Kampmann, High as the Waters Rise (Catapult)
Translated, from the German, by Anne Posten
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Family Clause (Farrar, Straus)
Translated, from the Swedish, by Alice Menzies
Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station (Riverhead)
Translated, from the Japanese, by Morgan Giles
Pilar Quintana, The Bitch (World Editions)
Translated, from the Spanish, by Lisa Dillman
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (New Directions)
Translated, from the Arabic, by Elisabeth Jaquette