As I wait on line to enter Cipriani Wall Street, I have a goal in mind: Find out what Miranda July is wearing. July, whose second novel, All Fours, came out in the spring, is one of five authors nominated for a National Book Award for fiction this year; she’s also a Prada collaborator and will presumably show up stylishly. The dress code tonight is formal, and guests at the National Book Foundation’s 75th awards ceremony have mostly complied, wearing tuxedos, ball gowns, and lots of sequins. For book people, though, black tie includes canvas tote bags.
In 2023, the lead-up to the National Book Awards was fraught. Ahead of the event, rumors circulated about finalists planning a “disruption†to protest the war in Gaza; in pre-response, Zibby Media and Book of the Month both pulled out as sponsors. The actual gesture, a measured statement calling for a cease-fire given onstage by a group of 18 nominees and winners, was far from controversial and hardly disruptive.
This year, despite an impending second Trump administration and a rash of book bans, the mood is looser. That’s reflected in the nominated books, too: Fiction front-runners James, by Percival Everett; July’s All Fours; and Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar, are deeply funny as well as brilliant. It’s all to a purpose: to unsettle, maybe, or stir something up in the reader by making them laugh. “I don’t know if it’s humor so much in James — it’s irony. We need irony right now,†Everett tells me later in the night.
Inside what used to be the National City Bank Building, people are milling around under the 60-foot Greek Revival ceilings. “I’m obsessed with Colored Television,†I hear someone say by the bar. I spot two women standing a few feet apart wearing the same burgundy gown — a Rent the Runway disaster — and overhear a few conversations about who might win the fiction award tonight. It seems like it’s Everett’s prize to lose.
The journalists head over to a set of bleacher seats to gaze onto the nominees eating dinner like visitors at a bookish human zoo. Halfway through the courses, the ceremony begins with a speech by host Kate McKinnon (she’s got jokes: “Books do so many things. They inspire, they transport, they kill spiders when you can’t find a shoeâ€). The lifetime-achievement awards go to Barbara Kingsolver and W. Paul Coates, who won the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Coates (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s father) has faced criticism since the announcement of the honor in September because his publishing house, Black Classic Press, reissued an antisemitic novel in 2022 called The Jewish Onslaught that was originally published in 1993. Despite that, he, like Kingsolver, receives a standing ovation. “I am not an interpreter. I prefer to let these voices speak to new generations for themselves,†Coates says in his speech. “My mission is recovery.†(The Jewish Onslaught was removed from Black Classic Press’s site not long after the backlash.)
A smaller standing ovation happens when Lena Khalaf Tuffaha wins for her book of poetry Something About Living, published by the University of Akron Press. “We are now living in the second November of the American-funded genocide in Palestine,†Tuffaha, whose father was born in Jerusalem, says. “I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and to make it stop.â€
Everyone sits up a little straighter when Lauren Groff, chair of the fiction judges, appears onstage. Along with Akbar, Everett, and July, the Nigerian author ’Pemi Aguda is nominated for Ghostroots, a collection of short stories, as is Hisham Matar for My Friends, his third novel, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction this year. The winner — and this feels right — is Everett, who takes the stage with a small smile on his face. Everett, 67 years old, who’s been publishing novels consistently since 1983, is brief but gracious in his speech, thanking his publishers and his wife, Danzy Senna, along with their two teenage sons, “whose near-complete apathy about my career helps me keep things in perspective.â€
During the after-party, I scan the crowd and spot Anne Carson in a sharp gray suit and wide red tie. No sign of July, but every time I see a woman with short, curly hair, I snap to attention. On the balcony upstairs where a DJ is stationed, everyone is doing the Electric Slide. The translator Lin King, who won the award for Translated Literature with Yáng ShuÄng-zÇ, tells me she’s “dumbfounded†at the win and a little thirsty: “I’ve been looking for water all night.†She’s having a great time. “I laughed so hard at Miranda July’s reading yesterday,†she says, “and Percival Everett gave me a hug. That was phenomenal.†On his way out the door in a red scarf, under the roar of “Must Be the Money,†Everett tells me “it feels great, of course, to be in conversation with these authors.â€
I find the crew from Deep Vellum, a Dallas press that was nominated for its first National Book Award this year for Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The Villain’s Dance. Mujila and Roland Glasser, who’s the book’s translator, and Deep Vellum’s publisher, Will Evans, are in matching bolo ties. New York is like Congo, Mujila says: Unlike Austria, where he lives now, “The city lives all in the night — a lot of things happen at night.â€
A wave of younger publishing people, not yet powerful enough to get seats at the table but key for the late-night energy, has filtered in to party. Not long after the ceremony, most of the more distinguished nominees have left for quieter places, and July is nowhere in sight; someone tells me they heard she was wearing “white briefs, which sounds interesting.†But Barbara Kingsolver is still around, holding court on the upstairs balcony in a long-sleeved red sequin dress. I sidle up to her just after she’s kicked off her heels. What’s going through her mind, I ask? “I feel incredibly encouraged by the courage of the authors here tonight,†she says, but she can’t talk long — she’s about to go to the dance floor. When the Sugarhill Gang’s “Jump on It†starts playing, she makes a beeline. “She’s dancing! She’s dancing!†I hear someone squeal to a friend. She’s still out there when “212,†by Azealia Banks, starts up around midnight, and I decide to leave them to it.