The National Book Foundation has been rolling out longlists for the National Book Awards all week, culminating in today’s for fiction. So time to rearrange your to-read pile and get on those library hold lists before everyone else! This year’s list (announced by The New Yorker) features many returners: from previous winner Richard Powers for Bewilderment, the follow-up to his Pulitzer winner, The Overstory, to previous finalists Lauren Groff (for her nunnery novel, Matrix), Elizabeth McCracken (for her playful collection The Souvenir Museum), and Anthony Doerr (for his All the Light We Cannot See follow-up, Cloud Cuckoo Land). Also on the list? Katie Kitamura, whose novel Intimacies, following a Hague interpreter, is also one of Vulture’s favorites of the year. And three debut novels: Jakob Guanzon’s Abundance, Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. The longlisted fiction authors join writers recognized on the Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature longlists. The finalists in all categories will be announced on October 5; below, find the full fiction longlist.
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Lauren Groff, Matrix
Jakob Guanzon, Abundance
Laird Hunt, Zorrie
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies
Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum: Stories
Jason Mott, Hell of a Book
Richard Powers, Bewilderment