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The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 1 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 20, 2024.
The 2024 Fiction Longlist includes authors at all stages of their careers, and features three debut novels and one debut short story collection. Two authors on the Fiction Longlist have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2020 for The Undocumented Americans; and Rachel Kushner was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008 for Telex from Cuba and in 2013 for The Flamethrowers.
Among these ten Longlisters are Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellows. This year’s honored Fiction authors have been recognized by numerous other awards and honors, including the Booker Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the Windham Campbell Prize, and the Whiting Award. Their writing has been featured in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, n +1, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Vogue, and elsewhere.
In their latest novels, two authors reinvent genre and expand the American literary canon. Percival Everett’s reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn centers Jim, an enslaved runaway who was relegated to the role of a mild-mannered companion in Mark Twain’s original telling. As Jim and Huck journey down the Mississippi River, readers see the world through James’s point of view—as he adjusts his language, mannerisms, and appearance to both appease the white people around him and to protect his own life. James considers authorial intent and the possibilities of agency, even within the most racist and inequitable contexts. Outside of the US, Rachel Kushner introduces readers to “Sadie Smith”—a 34-year-old undercover agent and American expat who is hired to infiltrate a group of radical French environmentalists. A nonbeliever amongst believers, Sadie is at the center of a community and remains ruthlessly individual even as her employers continue to raise the stakes. Part espionage and part existential thriller, Creation Lake dives deep into the world of ideology, environmental activism, and ultimately, the nature of identity itself.
Two Longlisted debut novels follow protagonists determined to carve their own paths forward. Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio follows the fiercely independent and academic overachiever Catalina Ituralde as she navigates complex family dynamics at home, micro-aggressions in and outside of the classroom, and the looming threat of her grandfather’s deportation. Told over the course of an undocumented Harvard student’s senior year, Catalina is the moving story of a young writer intent on finding love and humor in spite of—or, perhaps because of—the uncertainty of her future. Sam Sax’s queer, Jewish coming-of-age story follows Ezra in the span of time between when they light themself on fire and when they die at a protest outside of Trump Tower. Told in vignettes that detail everyone the novel’s protagonist has ever loved, every place they’ve ever felt accepted or excluded, and the reasons they decided on this final act of self-immolation, Yr Dead is a searing exploration of the histories, memories, and politics that shape our present and our future.
Two Longlisted titles showcase short story collections that depict reality as something speculative. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, the narrators in Ghostroots’ 12 stories reckon with every-day horror: infidelity, mysterious diseases, recollections of a tragic accident, and the pain of seeing their loved ones deteriorate. Throughout this debut collection, ’Pemi Aguda compassionately explores a cast of characters haunted by regrets and searching for freedom from the ghosts of their ancestors. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection follows a cast of chronically online characters yearning for intimacy, approval, and connection in real life. As they navigate repeated rejection—from dating apps and social media feeds to bedrooms and bars—the characters in these seven connected stories lay bare the awkwardness, isolation, and occasional delusion, of life and love in the internet age.
As a child, Khaled Abd al Hady hears a short story on the radio that alters the course of his life, prompting him to move from his native Libya to Scotland to attend university. My Friends by Hisham Matar follows Khaled and two friends living in exile in Britain as they come together and apart over decades, wrestling with revolution, war, and their loyalties to themselves and to their homeland. Impending death haunts the debut novel Martyr!, in which the poet Cyrus Shams grapples with the loss that has permeated his life—his mother’s death in a US airstrike when he was an infant, his and his father’s expatriation from their native Iran to the American Midwest, and later his father’s death by stroke—alongside Cyrus’s own alcohol and drug addiction recovery. As his obsession with martyrs grows, Cyrus tasks himself with uncovering his family’s past, writing a novel, and meeting a terminally ill Iranian artist living out her last days at the Brooklyn Museum, in Kaveh Akbar’s contemplation of grief, addiction, love, and finding hope and meaning in art.
This year’s Fiction Longlist features two titles that interrogate the role of gender in marriage, in sex, and in artmaking. On an unusually warm Sunday in November, housewife, mother, and former tennis champion Kathleen Beckett puts on her old, red bathing suit, enters her apartment complex’s semi-abandoned pool, and refuses to come out. Set over the course of eight hours, Jessica Anthony’s The Most paints an intimate portrait of marriage in the late 1950s—and the secrets, expectations, and lost loves that tells the story of one seemingly unremarkable couple and a larger cultural moment. In All Fours, when an unnamed 45-year-old female artist drives from Los Angeles to New York City for a two-week writing retreat, she spontaneously discards her plans and checks into a nondescript motel and begins to spend time with a married 31-year-old man, commissioning his wife to redecorate her rented room, and daring to imagine an entirely new way of living. Miranda July tells the story of one woman’s—at times desperate—desire to reinvent her life and to create art in the face of monotony, menopause, and mortality.
Publishers submitted a total of 473 books for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. The judges for Fiction are Jamie Ford, Lauren Groff (Chair), Zeyn Joukhadar, Chawa Magaña, and Reginald McKnight. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. For more information about the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the broadcast, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
‘Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots
Norton / W. W. Norton & Company
Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Jessica Anthony, The Most
Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Catalina
One World / Penguin Random House
Percival Everett, James
Doubleday / Penguin Random House
Miranda July, All Fours
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Hisham Matar, My Friends
Random House / Penguin Random House
Sam Sax, Yr Dead
McSweeney’s
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection
William Morrow / HarperCollins Publishers
