National Book Award Shortlists Announced

The shortlists for the 2024 National Book Awards have been announced. The winners will be announced on November 20, 2024.  The finalists are:

Fiction

'Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots
Norton / W. W. Norton & Company

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Percival Everett, James
Doubleday / Penguin Random House

Miranda July, All Fours
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House

Hisham Matar, My Friends
Random House / Penguin Random House

From the Award committee: Set in Lagos, Nigeria, the cast of characters in ’Pemi Aguda’s debut short story collection, Ghostroots, are haunted by regrets while searching for freedom from the ghosts of their ancestors. Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr! contemplates grief, addiction, and the work of finding meaning in art through the story of the newly sober and orphaned poet Cyrus Shams. In James, Percival Everett considers authorial intent and the possibilities of agency through a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that centers Jim, an enslaved runaway who was relegated to the role of a mild-mannered companion in Mark Twain’s original telling. In All Fours, Miranda July tells the story of an unnamed 45-year-old female artist’s—at times desperate—desire to reinvent her life and to create art in the face of monotony, menopause, and mortality. My Friends by Hisham Matar follows Khaled Abd al Hady and two friends living in exile in Britain as they come together and apart over decades, wrestling with revolution, war, and their loyalties to themselves and to their homeland.

Nonfiction:

Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
Viking Books / Penguin Random House

Eliza Griswold, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia
Crown / Penguin Random House

Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Random House / Penguin Random House

Deborah Jackson Taffa, Whiskey Tender
Harper / HarperCollins Publishers

From the Awards committee: In Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, anthropologist Jason De León embedded himself within a group of human smugglers to document the trauma, violence, and poverty that fuels both one intimate group, and the larger mass movement north of undocumented immigrants. Drawing on deep reporting, Eliza Griswold examines the progressive Christian church, Circle of Hope—from its founding in 1996 through its rapid expansion and eventual collapse—in Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church. Blending lived experience with meticulous research, Kate Manne asserts that weight stigma and discrimination play a part in all aspects of society, including healthcare, education, and employment in Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. In his memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie candidly recounts the 2022 attack on his life, its immediate aftermath, and his ongoing journey of physical rehabilitation and healing. Deborah Jackson Taffa explores her family’s history of displacement within the United States and considers how she came to understand and claim her mixed-tribe Native identity in her memoir, Whiskey Tender.

Poetry

Anne Carson, Wrong Norma
New Directions Publishing

Fady Joudah, […]
Milkweed Editions

m.s. RedCherries, mother
Penguin Books / Penguin Random House

Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry
Graywolf Press

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living
University of Akron Press

From the Awards committee: Anne Carson reflects on the ordinary and the everyday in Wrong Norma, and interspersed with images hand-drawn by Carson, the 25 prose poems feature glimpses at the inner workings—and often disjointed nature—of the human mind. Fady Joudah’s collection of poems—[…]—is a rumination on the unspeakable atrocities of war; the present and ongoing erasure of Palestinian people, history, and culture; and a dedication to a people’s everyday desires and humanity. Through poetry and prose, m.s. RedCherries’s debut collection, mother, tells the story of an Indigenous child adopted by a non-Native family and her journey, as an adult, to return to her tribe. Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss examines contemporary poetry with irreverence and love—interrogating which voices are enshrined in textbooks, anthologies, and publishing, and which are left out. In the face of displacement, grief, and the ongoing horrors of war, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living scrutinizes language and the obfuscation of Palestinian history, both in Palestine and across the diaspora.

Translated Literature

Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor’s Library
Translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain
Restless Books

Linnea Axelsson, Ædnan
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, The Villain’s Dance
Translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Deep Vellum / Deep Vellum Publishing

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Graywolf Press

Samar Yazbek, Where the Wind Calls Home
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
World Editions

From the Awards committee: Set in a dystopian future headed by an all-powerful government, Bothayna Al-Essa’s unnamed narrator is hired as a book censor and tasked with identifying books not fit for publication in The Book Censor’s Library, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, is an epic that relates the experiences of two Indigenous Sámi families over the course of three generations and one hundred years in a tale of displacement, cultural erasure, and resistance in the face of colonial oppression. In Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The Villain’s Dance, translated from the French by Roland Glasser, readers traverse timelines, perspectives, and borders, following a cast of characters whose quests for survival amidst political, environmental, and financial uncertainty somehow, ultimately, converge. Yáng Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, follows a fictional Japanese writer and her relationship with the charming yet closed-off Taiwanese woman who serves as her interpreter. In Where the Wind Calls Home, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, Samar Yazbek recounts the history of a country’s cultural richness and religious traditions through the eyes of a wounded 19-year-old soldier fighting to survive in the Syrian Civil War.

Young People's Literature

Violet Duncan, Buffalo Dreamer
Nancy Paulsen Books / Penguin Random House

Josh Galarza, The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky
Henry Holt and Company (BYR) / Macmillan Publishers

Erin Entrada Kelly, The First State of Being
Greenwillow Books / HarperCollins Publishers

Shifa Saltagi Safadi, Kareem Between
G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Angela Shanté, The Unboxing of a Black Girl
Page Street Publishing

From the Awards committee: In Buffalo Dreamer, a story inspired by Violet Duncan’s own family history, 12-year-old Summer eagerly anticipates summer vacation until she begins to have vivid, unnerving dreams about an Indigenous girl attempting to escape a real-life residential school. The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky, Josh Galarza’s debut novel, follows Brett as he grapples with his peers’ scrutiny and judgement after his journal goes viral on social media, and—with the help of unexpected friends—faces his own internalized fatphobia and disordered eating. In Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being, while Michael Rosario is preparing for the impending Y2K crisis by stockpiling supplies and catastrophizing, his life is forever altered by the arrival of Ridge, a mysterious, disoriented teenage boy from the year 2199. Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s novel-in-verse, Kareem Between, chronicles the story of Kareem, a Syrian American Muslim teen stuck in the middle of cultures, parents, and countries as he courageously forges his own moral compass. Angela Shanté reflects on the personal and the political in her ode to Black girlhood—told in vignettes and poems influenced by the author’s upbringing in New York City, The Unboxing of a Black Girl serves as a reminder to be gentle with your heart and your mind in defiance of a society that insists on boxing you in.

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These titles can be ordered from Page 158 Books in Wake Forest.