2018 National Book Awards Longlists Revealed

The National Book Foundation announced the longlists for the 2018 National Book Awards last week.

To be eligible for a 2018 National Book Award, a book must have been written by a U.S. citizen and published in the United States between December 1, 2017, and November 30, 2018. New this year is the Translated Literature category, which awards a work in translation; translated literature has not been formally recognized by the National Book Foundation’s awards program since the 1980s.

The 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Young People’s Literature was announced on Wednesday, September 12:

• The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (HarperTeen)
• The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin (Candlewick)
• We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss (Greenwillow)
• The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor (HarperCollins/Tegen)
• The Journey of Little Charlie by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic Press)
• Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka (Graphix)
• A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi (HarperTeen)
• Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough (Dutton)
• Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam by Elizabeth Partridge (Viking)
• What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper (Knopf)

The 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Translated Literature was announced on Wednesday, September 12:

• Disoriental by Négar Djavadi and translated by Tina Kover (Europa)
• Comemadre by Roque Larraquy and translated by Heather Cleary (Coffee House)
• The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail and translated by Dunya Mikhail and Max Weiss (New Directions)
• One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan and translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Black Cat)
• Love by Hanne Ørstavik and translated by Martin Aitken (Archipelago)
• Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life by Gunnhild Øyehaug and translated by Kari Dickson (FSG)
• Trick by Domenico Starnone and translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions)
• The Emissary by Yoko Tawada and translated by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions)
• Flights by Olga Tokarczuk and translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead)
• Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya and translated by Anya Migdal (Knopf)

The 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Poetry was announced on Thursday, September 13:

• Wobble by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan UP)
• feeld by Jos Charles (Milkweed)
• Be With by Forrest Gander (New Directions)
• American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin)
• Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez (Penguin)
• Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (Omnidawn)
• Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed (Coffee House)
• lo terciario / the tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera (Timeless, Infinite Light)
• Monument: Poems New and Selected by Natasha Trethewey (HMH)
• Eye Level by Jenny Xie (Graywolf)

The 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Nonfiction was announced on Thursday, September 13:

• One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson (Bloomsbury)
• The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation by Colin G. Calloway (Oxford University Press)
• Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll (Penguin)
• Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple (One World/Penguin Random House)
• American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson (Liveright/Norton)
• The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster)
• Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh (Scribner)
• Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket Books)
• The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (Oxford University Press)
• We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler (Liveright/Norton)

The 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction was announced on Friday, September 14:

• A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Graywolf)
• Gun Love by Jennifer Clement (Hogarth)
• Florida by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
• The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner (McSweeney’s)
• Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson (Soho)
• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (Algonquin)
• The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
• The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)
• There There by Tommy Orange (Knopf)
• Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Atria)

This year’s judging panel included several independent booksellers: Rachel Cass, head buyer at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, served on the Nonfiction panel; Stephen Sparks, co-owner of Point Reyes Books in Point Reyes Station, California, on the Poetry panel; Karen Maeda Allman, author events co-coordinator at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, on the Translated Literature panel; and Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Texas, on the Young People’s Literature panel.

Finalists will be revealed on October 10 and winners will be announced at the National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 14 in New York City.