The National Book Foundation has announced its complete list of finalists for this year’s National Book Awards. Below, we’ve collected free samples of many of the honored works for your reading pleasure.
Follow this link to check out the full longlist. The winners will be announced on Nov. 18.
Here’s more from the press release: “The selection of Finalists follows last month’s announcement of the National Book Award Longlists of ten books in each of the Awards’ four categories. The Longlists and Finalists were each chosen by a panel of five writers and literary experts. Of the twenty Finalists, only two—poet Terrance Hayes and Young People’s author Steve Sheinkin—have ever been NBA Finalists before.”
Finalists for Fiction
Karen E. Bender, Refund (Counterpoint Press)
Angela Flournoy, The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House)
Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles (Random House)
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (Doubleday/Penguin Random House)
Finalists for Nonfiction
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau/Penguin Random House)
Sally Mann, Hold Still (Little, Brown, a division of Hachette Book Group)
Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus (Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster)
Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink (Henry Holt and Company, a division of Macmillan)
Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light (Alfred A. Knopf)
Finalists for Poetry
Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (Penguin)
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf)
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions)
Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)
Finalists for Young People’s Literature
Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Laura Ruby, Bone Gap (Balzer + Bray, a division of HarperCollins Children’s Books)
Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War (Roaring Brook Press)
Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep (HarperCollins Children’s Books)
Noelle Stevenson, Nimona (HarperTeen/HarperCollins Children’s Books)