National Book Award Finalists

Good morning, readers! Below is a list of finalists for the National Book Award, check them out!*

Fiction:

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Aaliya Sohbi lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family's 'unnecessary appendage.' Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read-- by anyone...As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.

The UnAmericans: Stories by Molly Antopol

Moving from modern-day Jerusalem to McCarthy-era Los Angeles to communist Prague and back again. The UnAmericans is a stunning exploration of characters shaped by the forces of history.

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

Isolated by a disfiguring injury, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. As the creator of Trace Italian-- a text-based, role-playing game played through the mail-- Sean guides players from around the world. Lance and Carrie are high school students from Florida, explorers of the Trace. But when they take their play into the real world, disaster strikes, and Sean is called to account for it.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr*

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of WWII. 

Redeployment by Phil Klay

Phil Klay takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel*

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. 

Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken

A collection of stories navigates the fragile space between love and loneliness, including the title story in which a family finds their lives irrevocably changed by their teenage daughter's risky behavior.

Orfeo by Richard Powers

Composer Peter Els --the "Bioterrorist Bach" -- pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey and, through the help of his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime collaborator, he hatches a plan to turn his disastrous collision with Homeland Security into a work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around them.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson*

Abandoning her homeless existence to become a minister's wife, Lila reflects on her hardscrabble life on the run with a canny young drifter and her efforts to reconcile her painful past with her husband's gentle Christian worldview.

Some Luck by Jane Smiley*

An epic novel that spans thirty years in the lives of a farm family in Iowa, telling a parallel story of the changes taking place in America from 1920 through the early 1950s.

Non-Fiction:

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"--with predictable results--the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.

The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic by John Demos

Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the newly established United States looked outward toward the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers formed a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and "civilization." Its core element was a special school for "heathen youth" drawn from all parts ofthe earth, including the Pacific Islands, China, India, and, increasingly, the native nations of North America. 

No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal

As U.S. troops prepare to withdraw, the shocking tale of how the American military had triumph in sight in Afghanistan--and then brought the Taliban back from the dead.

The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 by Nigel Hamilton

Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR's masterful--and underappreciated--command of the Allied war effort.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?...This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive...

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr

This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

A vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation. 

When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation by Ronald C. Rosbottom

On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and nearly deserted Paris. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. Subsequently, an eerie sense of normalcy settled over the City of Light. 

Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart

Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart pursues a genealogy of the philosophical ideas from which America's revolutionaries drew their inspiration.

The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson examines what makes human beings supremely different from all other species and posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way.

Poetry:

Roget's Illusion by Linda Bierds

Why do we strive to articulate the world even as we know this is a shifting and illusory pursuit? Why do we continue to seek perfection, pursue beauty, yearn for immortality? Roget's Illusion offers no answer. It simply shows the striving.

A Several World by Brian Blanchfield

Landscape here is spatial theater, and a choreography recruits all standalone selves: solidarity beginning in an erotics of attunement, catching likenesses.

Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück

Tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch

A short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy.

Second Childhood by Fanny Howe

This book, however, is...a contemplation of how old age resembles childhood.

This Blue by Maureen N. McLane

Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now.

The Feel Trio by Frank Moten

The organizing principles, in our extramusical tailor's retrofit of fitting, sharp as a tack from the tone worlds of east by southeast of Sheffield, the Bronx's compassionate project/s and fly, flaired, flared Corona: listen to everything, relax the shape, approach with love, be worthy of a lovely t!

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media.

The Road to Emmaus by Spencer Reece

A moving, subtle sequence of narrative poems, from a sharp new poetic voice.

Collected Poems by Mark Strand

Magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.

*All of the nominees are available through OSL, but those marked with an asterisk are available from William Hall.