Louis Menand's Cold War cultural history “The Free World” and Hanif Abdurraqib's meditation on Black artistry “A Little Devil in America” are among the works on the nonfiction longlist for the National Book Awards.
On Thursday, the National Book Foundation also announced the poetry longlist, with nominees including Douglas Kearney's “Sho,” Hoa Nguyen's “A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure” and Forrest Gander’s “Twice Alive." The foundation has already released longlists of 10 for young people's literature and translation and on Friday will publish the fiction longlist.
Award judges will narrow the longlists for competitive categories to five on October 5. Winners, each of whom receive $10,000, will be announced Nov. 17 during a Manhattan ceremony.
Four of the poetry nominees are debut works: Threa Almontaser’s “The Wild Fox of Yemen,” Baba Badji's “Ghost Letters,” Desiree C. Bailey’s “What Noise Against the Cane" and Jackie Wang's “The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The World.” Others on the poetry longlist are CM Burroughs' “Master Suffering,” Andrés Cerpa's “The Vault” and Martín Espada's “Floaters.”
The nonfiction book features several works about race, among them Tiya Miles' “All That She Carried,” Heather McGhee's “The Sum of Us" and Clint Smith's “How the Word Is Passed.” The other nominees are Lucas Bessire's “Running Out,” Grace M. Cho's “Tastes Like War,” Scott Ellsworth's “The Ground Breaking,” Nicole Eustace's “Covered with Night” and Deborah Willis' “The Black Civil War Soldier.”
