On Friday, the National Book Foundation, in partnership with The New Yorker, announced the Longlist for Fiction for the 2017 National Book Awards, rounding out the Longlists for the four categories celebrated by the Award, among the highest literary awards given in the United States.
The mission of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America. Though it’s had it’s ups and downs, trying to find cultural relevancy and “fit in” to American culture, the National Book Award today has emerged as an important way to recognize some of the great work going on in American literature–and a great way for us readers to discover new books! So here are the longlists for each of the four categories that the National Book Award celebrates. Come into the Library soon to learn about each of these titles!
The short list will come out on Oct. 4, and the winners will be announced in a ceremony on Nov. 15. And we’ll be here for both announcements!
Fiction
Elliot Ackerman, Dark at the Crossing
Daniel Alarcón, The King Is Always Above the People: Stories
Charmaine Craig, Miss Burma
Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach
Lisa Ko, The Leavers
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, A Kind of Freedom
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
Carol Zoref, Barren Island (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Nonfiction
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Will be released on Oct. 7, 2017)
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
Poetry
Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Leslie Harrison, The Book of Endings (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via WorldCat!)
Marie Howe, Magdalene: Poems (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Laura Kasischke, Where Now: New and Selected Poems (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS
Shane McCrae, In the Language of My Captor (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Sherod Santos, Square Inch Hours (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via WorldCat!)
Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Mai Der Vang, Afterland
Young People’s Literature
Elana K. Arnold, What Girls Are Made Of (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Robin Benway, Far from the Tree
Samantha Mabry, All the Wind in the World
Mitali Perkins, You Bring the Distant Near
Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down
Erika L. Sánchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Check with your friendly Reference Librarians to order this book via ComCat!)
Laurel Snyder, Orphan Island
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
Rita Williams-Garcia, Clayton Byrd Goes Underground
Ibi Zoboi, American Street