The 2021 National Book Awards Longlist: Fiction

By The New Yorker

This year’s longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction includes three début novels: Jakob Guanzon’s “Abundance,” which captures twenty-four hours in the precarious life of a homeless father and son; “The Prophets,” by Robert Jones, Jr., a gay love story set on an antebellum cotton plantation; and the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s “The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois,” a family saga that spans more than a century of African American history.

Four of the ten authors in contention for the prize—Richard Powers, Elizabeth McCracken, Lauren Groff, and Anthony Doerr—have been recognized in the fiction category of the National Book Awards before. Other titles on the list include “Zorrie,” by Laird Hunt, who served as a judge for the award last year; “Intimacies,” by Katie Kitamura, a novel narrated by an unnamed translator at the International Criminal Court; and “Hell of a Book,” by Jason Mott, which turns the book tour, a familiar fixture of the literary-publicity apparatus, into a surreal exploration of race and artistic expression. Read the full list at The New Yorker.