This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2017 National Book Awards. Earlier this week, we shared the lists in the categories of Young People’s Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction. Today, we present the final category: Fiction.
In 2011, Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for Fiction for “Salvage the Bones,” a novel about a fictional Mississippi town devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The characters attempt to fortify their homes, only to see their surroundings washed away. Ward is long-listed this year for “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” set in the same fictional town. In the new book, “the storm lingers, ghostlike,” Vinson Cunningham wrote recently in The New Yorker. “Ward’s lyricism seems inextricable from the politics that emerged from the storm,” he adds.
“Sing, Unburied, Sing” is one of several books on this year’s longlist to address timely material. “Dark at the Crossing,” by Elliot Ackerman, is a love story set on the Syrian border; “Miss Burma,” by Charmaine Craig, is a family history of a persecuted minority in colonial Myanmar, the Karen; and “The Leavers,” by Lisa Ko, depicts the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant in the United States.
Ko is one of four début writers on the list, along with Carmen Maria Machado, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, and Carol Zoref. Two of the writers on this year’s list have contended for the award before: Ward and Jennifer Egan, who was a finalist, in 2001, for “Look at Me.”
The full list is below.
Elliot Ackerman, “Dark at the
Crossing”
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Daniel Alarcón, “The King Is Always Above the People:
Stories”
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Charmaine Craig, “Miss
Burma”
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic
Jennifer Egan, “Manhattan
Beach”
Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Lisa Ko, “The
Leavers”
Algonquin Books / Workman
Min Jin Lee,
“Pachinko”
Grand Central Publishing / Hachette
Carmen Maria Machado, “Her Body and Other Parties:
Stories”
Graywolf Press
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, “A Kind of
Freedom”
Counterpoint Press
Jesmyn Ward, “Sing, Unburied,
Sing”
Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Carol Zoref, “Barren
Island”
New Issues Poetry & Prose
The judges for the category this year are Alexander Chee, the author of “The Queen of the Night” and “Edinburgh”; Dave Eggers, the founder of the publishing company McSweeney’s and the author of, among other books, “A Hologram for the King,” which was a 2012 finalist for the National Book Award; Annie Philbrick, the owner of Bank Square Books, in Connecticut; Karolina Waclawiak, the author of “How to Get into the Twin Palms” and “The Invaders”; and Jacqueline Woodson, a National Book Award finalist for fiction, last year, for “Another Brooklyn,” and a recipient of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, in 2014, for “Brown Girl Dreaming.”
National Book Awards finalists will be announced on October 4th, and winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 15th.
