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40 Nominees Unveiled For The 2017 National Book Awards

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Four days, 40 nominees — and now, a clear idea of which writers have a shot to win the 2017 National Book Awards.

The National Book Foundation unveiled its longlists of nominees in stages this week, releasing a new set of 10 nominees each day. The rollout concluded Friday with the list of fiction contenders.

Frankly, any attempt to give the dozens of nominees their due in such a limited space would be foolhardy — so we'll simply remind you that you've still got some time to read as many as you can. The next round of finalists will be unveiled on Oct. 4, and the winners will be announced on Nov. 15.

Find the nominees below, with links to any reviews or interviews NPR has conducted, where available.


Fiction

Elliot Ackerman: Dark at the Crossing
Daniel Alarcón: The King Is Always Above the People: Stories
Charmaine Craig: Miss Burma
Jennifer Egan: Manhattan Beach
Lisa Ko: The Leavers
Min Jin Lee: Pachinko Carmen Maria Machado: Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton: A Kind of Freedom
Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing
Carol Zoref: Barren Island

Nonfiction

Erica Armstrong Dunbar: Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
Frances FitzGerald: The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
James Forman Jr.: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
Masha Gessen: The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
David Grann: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Naomi Klein: No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

Kevin Young: Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News

Poetry

Frank Bidart: Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
Chen Chen: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
Leslie Harrison: The Book of Endings
Marie Howe: Magdalene: Poems
Laura Kasischke: Where Now: New and Selected Poems
Layli Long Soldier: WHEREAS
Shane McCrae: In the Language of My Captor
Sherod Santos: Square Inch Hours
Danez Smith: Don't Call Us Dead: Poems
Mai Der Vang: Afterland

Young People's Literature

Elana K. Arnold: What Girls Are Made Of
Robin Benway: Far from the Tree
Samantha Mabry: All the Wind in the World
Mitali Perkins: You Bring the Distant Near
Jason Reynolds: Long Way Down
Erika L. Sánchez: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Laurel Snyder: Orphan Island
Angie Thomas: The Hate U Give
Rita Williams-Garcia: Clayton Byrd Goes Underground
Ibi Zoboi: American Street

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: September 18, 2017 at 11:00 PM CDT
A previous version of this story omitted nonfiction nominee Timothy B. Tyson's The Blood of Emmett Till.
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