Updated September 17, 2021 at 10:15 AM ET
The longlists for the National Book Awards are here — 40 titles, representing a broad range of new voices, previous nominees, debuts and book-world veterans.
You can click on the links below to jump to the individual lists, and we've included links to some great reviews and interviews with the nominated authors.
Finalists will be announced October 5th, and we're set to find out the winners November 17th during a live ceremony at a New York City venue — a return to form after last year's pandemic-induced virtual broadcast. But there will be virtual elements, and for those who can't make it to New York, the event will still be streaming live.
Fiction
Nonfiction
Poetry
Translated Literature
Young People's Literature
Fiction
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Lauren Groff, Matrix
Jakob Guanzon, Abundance
Laird Hunt, Zorrie
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
Robert Jones, Jr., The Prophets
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies
Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum: Stories
Jason Mott, Hell of a Book
Richard Powers, Bewilderment
Nonfiction
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
Lucas Bessire, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
Grace M. Cho, Tastes Like War: A Memoir
Scott Ellsworth, The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice
Nicole Eustace, Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Deborah Willis, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship
Poetry
Threa Almontaser, The Wild Fox of Yemen
Baba Badji, Ghost Letters
Desiree C. Bailey, What Noise Against the Cane
CM Burroughs, Master Suffering
Andrés Cerpa, The Vault
Martín Espada, Floaters
Forrest Gander, Twice Alive
Douglas Kearney, Sho
Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void
Translated Literature
Maryse Condé, Waiting for the Waters to Rise, translated from the French by Richard Philcox
Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Ge Fei, Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse
Nona Fernández, The Twilight Zone, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Bo-Young Kim, On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, translated from the Korean by Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell
Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West
Elvira Navarro, Rabbit Island: Stories, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses, translated from the German by Jackie Smith
Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugale
Samar Yazbek, Planet of Clay, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Young People's Literature
Safia Elhillo, Home Is Not a Country
Shing Yin Khor, The Legend of Auntie Po
Darcie Little Badger, A Snake Falls to Earth
Malinda Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club
Kyle Lukoff, Too Bright to See
Kekla Magoon, Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People
Amber McBride, Me (Moth)
Anna-Marie McLemore, The Mirror Season
Carole Boston Weatherford; illustrations by Floyd Cooper, Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre
Paula Yoo, From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement
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