The National Book Foundation has released its longlist of nominees for the National Book Award. Awards are given in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and Young People’s Literature. This is the first year that the judges have released a longlist. Finalists will be announced October 16th. The four Winners will be announced at the 64th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 20th. Below is the list of fiction nominees. Visit The National Book Foundation website for the complete list for all four categories.
Tom Drury, Pacific (Grove Press)
Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point (Harper/HarperCollinsPublishers)
Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth/Random House)
James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA)
Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group USA)
George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House)
Joan Silber, Fools (W.W. Norton & Company)
From the NBF website: Established in 1950, the National Book Award is an American literary prize administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. A pantheon of such writers as William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, John Updike, Katherine Anne Porter, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, E. Annie Proulx, and Colum McCann have all won the Award.
