This morning, live on Buzzfeed’s AM to DM, the finalists for the 2018 National Book Awards (arguably the country’s most prestigious and high profile literary prize) were announced. 1,637 submitted titles were whittled down to just five per category (Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature), the authors of which will wait on tenterhooks between now and November 14th, when the five winners will be announced at the glitzy 69th (nice) National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.
To tide you over until mid-November, and to remind you of how these books were received upon their release earlier this year, here’s a taste of what the critics wrote about the National Book Award Finalists for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Translated Literature (sorry, Young People’s Literature; we’ll get there someday).
Congratulations to all the finalists!
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Finalists for Fiction
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Graywolf)
11 Rave • 1 Mixed
“The characters who populate the nine stories in Jamel Brinkley’s singular collection feel simultaneously like budding children and grown men who have lived several lifetimes … They report on their worlds with an outsider quality so characteristic of the young—observant and aware but struggling to gain access to others—yet are capable of distilling the motivations of those around them with a deftness so swift it’s almost damning … his masterfully paced stories bring each character he constructs into the half-light, where they often remain seductively enigmatic … Through pages of peerless prose and startingly sharp sentences, what ultimately emerges is a constantly reframed argument about the role of power and masculinity, where vulnerability pulses beneath a skin of self-preservation.”
–Kristen Radtke (The Los Angeles Times)
Florida by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
17 Rave • 10 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Despite its departures from Groff’s earlier work, the collection still conjures that feeling of when the floor falls out from under you; as in Fates and Furies, familiar, everyday life dangles by a thin string … Taken together, the stories have the feel of autobiography, although, as in a Salvador Dali painting, their emotional disclosures are encrypted in phantasmagoria. Fates and Furies spelunked into characters’ psyches, while Groff’s short fiction projects psychology outward, externalizing dread, pleasure, and innocence in feral cats, jasmine, and cygnets … Groff has always been a sentence-level writer, and the sentences indigenous to Floridaare gorgeously weird and limber … The author practices a kind of alchemical noticing that destabilizes reality and brings the outside world into alignment with characters’ inner lives.”
–Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson (Soho)
1 Rave • 1 Positive
“…imagine a plot hybrid of Dickens and George Saunders—but I’m not going to tell you about that because I think what happens is less important than all that weirdness … Where the Dead Sit Talking, then—in its affecting affectlessness—is a Native American novel about the failure of Native American novels to bring meaning to Native American lives … Reading Hobson is like being up in that heaven, fixed and distant, watching his characters scurry about in pursuit of their spirits and their fates.”
–J.C. Hallman (The Brooklyn Rail)
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The Great Believers is, as far as I know, among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present—among the first, that is, to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early years as well as its course and its repercussions over the decades. Makkai puts the epidemic (which, of course, has not yet ended) into historical perspective without distancing it or blunting its horrors … It would be futile to try to convey the novel’s considerable population, or its plots and subplots, though both population and plots are ingeniously interwoven. The question ‘What happens next?’ remains pressing from the first page to the last … Although I can’t help wishing the two stories had worked together more potently, that doesn’t detract from the deep emotional impact of The Great Believers, nor does it diminish Makkai’s accomplishment. She has borne unblinking witness to history and to a horrific episode already in danger—among Americans, that is—of becoming a horror story out of the past.”
–Michael Cunningham (The New York Times Book Review)
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)
14 Rave • 3 Positive
“I was drawn to her [Sigrid Nunez’s] sixth novel as a fresh addition to the literature of grief, but within pages realized The Friend has as much to say about literature as about grief, and was wondering how she’d slipped below my radar … Nunez deftly turns this potentially mawkish story into a penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory, what it means to be a writer today, and various forms of love and friendship — including between people and their pets. All in a taut 200 pages …a mini-Nunez festival for me, which offered ample evidence that it’s no fluke. In fact, this nuanced, exceptionally literary novel about devotion is a natural outgrowth of Sempre Susan…’The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?’ As her narrator confronts multiple losses, Nunez’s affecting novel probes the issue closely.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
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Finalists for Nonfiction
The Indian World of George Washington by Colin G. Calloway (Oxford University Press)
1 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The fateful relationship between George Washington and the Indian tribes that bordered the new Republic is the subject of Colin G. Calloway’s brilliantly presented and refreshingly original The Indian World of George Washington … Mr. Calloway deftly brings to life figures such as the Mohawk war chief and statesman Joseph Brant, the Miami war chief and realist Little Turtle and the bicultural Creek chief and consummate diplomat Alexander McGillivray—all towering figures who exercised the sort of outsize influence over the nation’s destiny that better known American Indian figures such as Sitting Bull and Geronimo never approached. An essential new entry in the literature of George Washington and the early Republic, The Indian World of George Washington conveys his interactions with Indians and the role of Indian land in Washington’s public and personal life ‘from cradle to grave.’ ”
–Peter Cozzens (The Wall Street Journal)
American Eden by Victoria Johnson (Liveright)
1 Rave • 5 Positive
“Early America’s foremost botanist was also New York’s greatest institution builder, a man of ‘Industry and Talents.’ … In her captivating biography American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic Victoria Johnson describes how, at a time when ‘Philadelphians thought they inhabited the Athens of America,’ Hosack helped to tip the scales in New York’s favor … Along the way, she restores this attractive polymath—who today is mainly remembered, thanks to a small role in a certain hip-hop musical, as the doctor-in-attendance at the 1804 duel between two of his patients, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton —to his rightful place in American history. The rescue from oblivion is long overdue.”
–Penelope Rowlands (The Wall Street Journal)
Heartland by Sarah Smarsh (Scribner)
5 Rave • 6 Positive
“Heartland is her map of home, drawn with loving hands and tender words. This is the nation’s class divide brought into sharp relief through personal history … Those familiar with Smarsh’s breakout writing about red-state politics will find a more subdued political voice in Heartland. The memoir is an extended reflection on divides that are rooted in class and the distance between what we wish were true about our country—in Smarsh’s words, the ‘wobbly claim that you get what you work for’—and its reality … Heartland is a thoughtful, big-hearted tale. Smarsh celebrates uncelebrated feminists who were the first to work jobs no middle-class women would touch … Heartland is a welcome interruption in the national silence that hangs over the lives of the poor and a repudiation of the culture of shame that swamps people who deserve better.”
–Elizabeth Catte (The Washington Post)
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (Oxford University Press)
6 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed
“In describing Locke’s life as a black man, a thinker and fighter in social causes, and a homosexual, Stewart, professor of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, must in a way describe many different Alain Lockes. That such a gripping and cohesive narrative could be forged out of such fractured material is no mean accomplishment … Stewart’s literary analysis of this movement and its many works, offshoots, and descendants is unerringly sharp and interesting, and he refreshingly includes as much that speaks against his subject as speaks for him … Jeffrey Stewart has written the definitive study that life has always warranted – and, fittingly, he’s made it excellent reading in the process.”
–Steve Donoghue (The Christian Science Monitor)
We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler (Liveright)
6 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“We the Corporations is a must-read for anyone interested in the corporate rights debate. As Winkler notes, Citizens United is one of the Supreme Court’s most controversial decisions. Yet most people who criticize (or praise) the Court’s decision don’t understand the backdrop on which it was based. Winkler advances an important and powerful point: corporations held most of the same rights as natural persons long before Citizens United. Winkler’s account also leaves us with some important issues that warrant further consideration … Winkler’s thought-provoking tale leaves readers to reflect on what, if anything, should be done about the corporate rights movement … it will make you think critically about one of the most consequential yet understudied civil rights movements.”
–Ryan Azad (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
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Finalists for Poetry
Wobble by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press)
1 Rave
“Armantrout (Entanglements) probes the place of sincerity in a post-modern cultural landscape in this formally dexterous and conceptually daring collection. Taking the form of prose poems, spare lyrics, sequences, and provocative hybrids, the individual pieces in this volume unify through an interest in technology and its role in shaping how humans inhabit language and affect … This volume is marked by wry humor and striking self-awareness when considering writerly craft. Indeed, Armantrout’s intelligence and keen insight are equally present in the work’s humor and cultural commentary.”
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin)
9 Rave • 2 Positive
“His new book, a short volume of sonnets, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, is a gift in a fraught moment. These sonnets, existential, political, personal, retain a moral ferocity and urgency that propels that entire cycle forward … These poems are acutely aware of the literary tradition Hayes works in, with as many references to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, to Derek Walcott and Langston Hughes, wrestling with the implications of blackness and literary tradition. Hayes’ inhabits the deeply troubling historical moment. But these poems are timeless.”
–Faraz Rizvi (The Millions)
Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (Omnidawn)
1 Rave • 1 Positive
“Haunting, incisive, and exceptionally spare, Nguyen’s shape-shifting poems confront death, displacement, and the emptiness within and around us … Nguyen also employs incantatory repetition to chilling effect … A soaring tribute, a mesmerizing visual feat, and an all-around astonishing debut.”
–Briana Shemroske (Booklist)
Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed (Coffee House)
1 Rave • 1 Positive
“Reed’s visceral and teasingly cerebral debut probes black identity, sexuality, and violence and is inseparably personal and political … Reed’s voice is engaging and vulnerable … Abundantly brave, Reed’s debut finds language as ‘a body behaving// as will any dialect, lifting stranger and more/ urgent mouths to the same sentence.’ ”
Eye Level by Jenny Xie (Graywolf)
5 Rave • 1 Mixed
“This is a book about the necessity of toggling between the enchantments of the page and the allure of the horizon: Xie’s ‘appetite for elsewhere’ competes with a longing for the ‘infinite places within language to hide.’ The poems dazzle in their local details, even as they pine for global reach and scale … Xie comes across as a magician of perspective and scale, troubled by her own virtuosic illusions. Through Xie’s eyes, we can see the binds and paradoxes of being stuck inside a single point of view. When you’re at eye level with another person, however, you can be briefly prodded out of solipsism: you see yourself being seen … Eye Level with worldly landmarks and private discoveries, mapped routes and circuitous thoughts, suggests a kind of Fodor’s or Lonely Planet guide to inner life … Xie’s swallowed commands, shorn of their predicates, suggest that the rules of her art cannot be codified.”
–Dan Chiasson (The New Yorker)
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Finalists for Translated Literature
Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, Translated by Tina Kover (Europa)
6 Rave • 2 Positive
“…a novel teeming with perspicacious observations and hypotheses on exile, statelessness and reshaping identity. Tina Kover’s dynamic translation into English is a high-wire act, capturing all the animation and vigour of a breathless narrative voice … The novel pulsates with life, but does not shirk from violence — seen mostly from a child’s perspective. The gorgeous prose, the heady elements of magical realism…takes the edge off the relentless turmoil described throughout. Similarly, Djavadi’s humour is infectious, whether overtly satirical or simply wisecracking … Though by no means a failure, the wildly persuasive expressiveness of the first half of Disoriental does flag during its second. Nevertheless, it is an absorbing, important and noteworthy counterpoint to western accounts of this period of Iran’s history and its abiding aftermath.”
–Catherine Taylor (The Financial Times)
Love by Hanne Østavik, Translated by Martin Aitken (Archipelago)
4 Rave • 4 Positive
“Love, a trim and electrifying novel … is undergirded by the present tense and made incandescent by Orstavik’s seemingly effortless omniscient perspective, sometimes switching between Jon’s mind and Vibeke’s from sentence to sentence … Orstavik’s mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child … The primeval darkness of the forest looms, biting as the cold that seems a character throughout this excellent novel of near misses.”
–Claire Vaye Watkins (The New York Times Book Review)
Trick by Domenico Starnone, Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa)
4 Rave • 2 Positive
“…[a] layered, alternately witty and melancholy story … In her fascinating introduction to Trick, [Lahiri] writes with captivating skill about the complex language choices she had to make … It’s all fascinating stuff. But, in a sense, it pulls attention from the novel. I’d suggest reading Trick first, then reading Lahiri’s insightful introduction. Otherwise, like me, you might find yourself marveling at her mastery of language but distracted by wondering how she landed on words like ‘agglutination’ or phrases such as ‘omniscient homunculus.’ ”
–Manuel Roig-Franzia (The Washington Post)
The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, Translated by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions)
3 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The poles between which Tawada oscillates are thus, not quite independently of her choice of language, the interplay between seriousness and frivolity. The result, in which farce is played as tragedy and tragedy as farce, is a big part of what makes Tawada one of the best and most unique writers working today … The book’s vision of closed states, xenophobia, mass extinction, and the gulf between the undying adults and their feeble progeny makes it one of the few literary futures that makes you sit up and say ‘Oh yeah, that’s totally going to happen’ … From this description, you’d probably imagine Tawada’s book to be a gloomy dystopic nightmare. Instead, it is charming, light, and unapologetically strange, with a distinct ‘indie cinema’ feel … Tawada finds a way to make a story of old men trapped in unending life and children fated to die before their time joyful, comic, and—frankly—a huge comfort.”
–J.W. McCormack (BOMB)
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead)
10 Rave • 9 Positive
“It is a novel of intuitions as much as ideas, a cacophony of voices and stories seemingly unconnected across time and space, which meander between the profound and the facetious, the mysterious and the ordinary, and whose true register remains one of glorious ambiguity … Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own … Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness.”
–Kapka Kassabova (The Guardian)
