The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
TAYARI JONES’ NOVEL ON AWARD LONGLIST
Tayari Jones’ “An American Marriage” and Tommy Orange’s “There, There,” two of the year’s most talked-about novels, are on the fiction longlist for the National Book Awards.
Other books announced Friday by the National Book Foundation include Lauren Groff ’s “Florida,” Brandon Hobson’s “Where the Dead Sit Talking” and Jennifer Clement’s “Gun Love.” The list features four debut works, including Orange’s book, and three short story collections, Groff ’s among them.
Earlier this week, the book foundation released longlists of 10 in the categories of translation, poetry, young people’s literature and non-fiction. Shortlists of five will come out Oct. 10. Winners will be announced Nov. 14.
Pulitzer Prize winners Natasha Trethewey and Rae Armantrout are among those on the poetry longlist for the National Book Awards. Authors in the nonfiction category include Steve Coll, Sarah Smarsh and Rebecca Solnit.
The awards are chosen by five-member judging panels that include writers, critics and others in the literary community.
Jones’ book, a story told mostly in letters about a black man’s wrongful imprisonment, already was widely known thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s selecting it for her book club. Jones is an Atlanta native and is part of the creative writing program at Emory University this fall as a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Orange’s novel about an American Indian community in Oakland, California, has received near-universal praise, with The New York Times calling it a “revelation” that marks “the passing of a generational baton.”
Besides “Florida,” judges chose a pair of debut story collections: “A Lucky Man,” by Jamel Brinkley and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ “Heads of the Colored People: Stories.”
Also on Friday’s longlist were Daniel Gumbiner’s “The Boatbuilder,” Rebecca Makkai’s “The Great Believers” and Sigrid Nunez’s “The Friend.”
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Trethewey was on the Emory faculty for 15 years and is now at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Also on the poetry longlist were Jos Charles’ “feeld,” Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “Ghost Of,” Raquel Salas Rivera’s “the tertiary” and Jenny Xie’s “Eye Level.”
In nonfiction, Coll was cited for “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan” and Smarsh for “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.” Solnit is on the longlist for “Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays).” Others in nonfiction include Carol Anderson for “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy,” Colin G. Calloway for “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation” and Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple for “Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War.”
Also on the nonfiction list were Victoria Johnson for “American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic,” David Quammen for “The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life,” Jeffrey C. Stewart for “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” and Adam Winkler for “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.”