NEW YORK — Novels by Lauren Groff and Bill Clegg and a story collection by Edith Pearlman are among the 10 nominees on the fiction longlist of the National Book Awards.
Adam Johnson’s “Fortune Smiles: Stories,” his first book since his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Orphan Master’s Son,” was also a finalist, the National Book Foundation announced Thursday.
Former National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen, whose novel “Freedom” was bypassed in 2010, missed out again this year with “Purity.” But the nominees do include an author he has befriended and encouraged to write fiction, Nell Zink, cited for “Mislaid.”
Longlists for young people’s literature, poetry and fiction were announced earlier this week, with nominees ranging from a children’s book about Malcolm X by one of his daughters to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ best-selling meditation on racism and police violence, “Between the World and Me.” Judges, who include critics, booksellers and fellow authors, for the four competitive categories will narrow the respective lists to five nominees Oct. 14. The winners, each of whom receives $10,000, will be announced Nov. 18 at the annual awards dinner ceremony in Manhattan. An honorary medal for lifetime achievement will be presented to Don DeLillo.
Clegg’s “Did You Ever Have a Family” is the first novel from a literary agent known for his unsettling memoir “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.” Pearlman, who only began receiving widespread recognition in her 70s, was a finalist in 2011 for the collection “Binocular Vision” and is a nominee this year for “Honeydew.” Groff’s portrait of marriage, “Fates and Furies,” is one of the fall’s most acclaimed works of fiction, while T. Geronimo Johnson’s academic satire, “Welcome to Braggsville,” was praised in February by The Washington Post as “the most dazzling, most unsettling, most oh-my-God-listen-up novel you’ll read this year.”
The other finalists are Jesse Ball’s “A Cure for Suicide,” Karen E. Bender’s “Refund,” Angela Flournoy’s “The Turner House” and Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life.”
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