The National Book Award has officially announced the finalists for its 2018 prize, and we at Bookstr would like to offer our best wishes to all the prospective winners! The announcement is a very emotional one, as evidenced by a recent tweet from Fiction nominee Lauren Groff:
I’m toggling between weeping my eyes out about this and checking on the dark advance of Hurricane Michael, a mental state that feels so weirdly appropriate for this story collection. https://t.co/z8dPKmJlGt
— Lauren Groff (@legroff) October 10, 2018
The National Book Award is one of the most prestigious awards in literature, and a trusted metric for which works of the year are the most worth reading. The nominees spring from all across the globe, and this year, the themes that stand out among the nominees are those of cultural, social, and political division, gender, class, and consumerism.
Image via Paperback Paris
In an interview with NPR, Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, explained how the Award would be taking a different approach to selecting its winners this year:
This year instead of just celebrating the best American literature, we’re celebrating the best literature in America. We’re from everywhere, and we have to celebrate the world we live in.
The winners of the National Book Award will be announced on November 14th, a day after all the nominees will attend an event at The New School at which they will read excerpts from their work.
And without further ado, here is the full list of the nominees for the 69th National Book Awards:
Fiction
Jamel Brinkley: A Lucky Man
Lauren Groff: Florida
Brandon Hobson: Where the Dead Sit Talking
Rebecca Makkai: The Great Believers
Sigrid Nunez: The Friend
Nonfiction
Colin G. Calloway: The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation
Victoria Johnson: American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
Sarah Smarsh: Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Jeffrey C. Stewart: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Adam Winkler: We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
Poetry
Rae Armantrout: Wobble
Terrance Hayes: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Diana Khoi Nguyen: Ghost Of
Justin Phillip Reed: Indecency
Jenny Xie: Eye Level
Translated Literature
Négar Djavadi: Disoriental, Translated by Tina Kover
Hanne Ørstavik: Love, Translated by Martin Aitken
Domenico Starnone: Trick, Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
Yoko Tawada: The Emissary, Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
Olga Tokarczuk: Flights, Translated by Jennifer Croft
Young People’s Literature
Elizabeth Acevedo: The Poet X
M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin: The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge
Leslie Connor: The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle
Christopher Paul Curtis: The Journey of Little Charlie
Jarrett J. Krosoczka: Hey, Kiddo
Featured Image Via The New School and Locus Magazine.