NEW YORK:
Two of the summer’s most talked about novels, Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half” and Megha Majumdar’s “A Burning,” are on the National Book Awards fiction longlist. Judges also nominated the story collection “If I Had Two Wings,” by Randall Kenan, who died in August.
List concludes a week during which the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, announced nominees for translation, poetry, young people’s literature and nonfiction. On Oct. 6, the lists will be narrowed from 10 to 5 books in each category. Winners will be announced Nov 18, with honorary medals being awarded to novelist Walter Mosley and to the late Simon & Schuster CEO
whose husband will accept on her behalf.
Many of the fiction nominees are younger authors, under age 50, with a handful or less of published works. Two books are debut novels: “The Burning,” the story of a woman in India who is accused of terrorism, and Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain,” a family saga set