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The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction with The New Yorker. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 6 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 18, 2026. For more information and to register to watch the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
The 2026 Fiction Longlist features two debut novels among the ten titles. Six authors on the Longlist have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation: Hannah Lillith Assadi, a 2018 5 Under 35 honoree for Sonora; Kimberly Blaeser, a 2026 Science + Literature honoree for Ancient Light; Edwidge Danticat, a 1995 Finalist for Fiction for Krik? Krak! and a 2007 Finalist for Nonfiction for Brother, I’m Dying; Louise Erdrich, a 1999 Finalist for Young People’s Literature for The Birchbark House, a 2001 Finalist for Fiction for The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and the Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for The Round House; Marlon James, a 2019 Finalist for Fiction for Black Leopard, Red Wolf; and Valeria Luiselli, a 2014 5 Under 35 honoree for Faces in the Crowd.
This year’s honorees include fellows from the Guggenheim Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, and a past Wisconsin Poet Laureate. The Longlisted authors have been previously honored by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the American Book Award, the Aspen Literary Prize, the Booker Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Story Prize, and more.
Three works Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction transcend genre and defy categorization to, ultimately, prioritize human connection. Louise Erdrich’s story collection features an expansive cast of human and nonhuman characters—a young girl and a guard dog, the editor of a tribal newsletter, a Burmese python, a Venetian vampire, and many more. Accompanied by commissioned illustrations by Erdrich’s daughter Aza Erdrich Abe, Python’s Kiss is a meditation on the lineages we descend from, and the many ways in which our lives—and afterlives—are linked with people, animals, and land surrounding us. Poet Kimberly Blaeser’s debut story collection explores themes of displacement and belonging through the lives of contemporary Anishinaabe characters. Blending horror, humor, and the supernatural, the stories in Red Ants tackle the reality and mythos of advanced technology, missing and found family, and life on and off of the Rez. Ro—a trans healthcare worker who was recently diagnosed with autism—and their partner Liam live in a secluded cabin in rural Florida in Morgan Thomas’s Mad Eden. This debut novel blurs time and genre, interspersing Ro’s story with excerpts from the eponymous online fantasy story, and exploring what it means to seek joy and care in an increasingly hostile world.
Three Longlisted titles explore how memory and grief shift over time, and how we make sense of ourselves in the aftermath of unspeakable violence. Magnolia, a Haitian American real estate agent living in Miami, struggles to tell her family the truth after surviving a mass shooting in Edwidge Danticat’s novel Dèy. As Magnolia excavates her relationships and responsibilities from Haiti to the United States, she reflects on violence—in her home country and adopted country—and the many forms of mourning experienced through immigration, gentrification, and diasporic identity. Set in Kingston, Jamaica in 1988, The Disappearers follows the aftermath of a brutal, homophobic mob attack against eight Black and mixed-race gay men at a play rehearsal—where one man is murdered. Chronicled by multiple narrators over time, Marlon James’s queer epic is both a crime thriller and sociocultural study of the early years of the AIDS epidemic about erasure and connection, violence and desire, and the cost of living authentically. In Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sufien is forced to flee from Palestine as a child during the 1948 Nakba and then spends the rest of his life searching for home—materially, in Kuwait, Italy, and the United States, and metaphorically, in women, family, and work. Sufien shares his life story from his deathbed, weaving a tale that transcends countries and decades, inspired by Assadi’s late father and the unanswerable question of belonging after exile.
Parents and children are at the heart of two other Longlisted titles, exploring family curses, inheritance, and reinvention. Spanning continents, languages, and four generations, readers follow a mother-daughter duo as they reconstruct their lives amid the mother’s divorce and daughter’s adolescence in Beginning Middle End. Valeria Luiselli’s novel charts the pair’s road trip to Sicily, where they each grapple with their legacy—a grandmother with signs of dementia and an ancient artifact that may or may not be cursed—in this examination of generational memory. Set in 1990s Bogotá, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You tells the story of a father and daughter learning to live with each other after the mother’s death—Ignacio, a man haunted by the young man he once loved, and Valentina, his lonely teenage daughter. As Valentina seeks the truth about her parents’ past, Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel explores Colombia’s queer underground community, violence, and the consequences that come with rejecting your true self.
Everyday settings transform and entrap in two of this year’s Longlisted titles, challenging their characters’ relationships to place, the past, and with one another. The protagonist of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel The Renovation cares for her dying father and anxiety-riddled husband after migrating from her native Istanbul to Italy. While struggling to secure a job, she becomes engrossed with home improvement projects and discovers that her second-floor bathroom has transformed into a Turkish prison cell—with guards and fellow inmates—in this story about migration, memory, and the meaning of home. Septuagenarian Ivan is stranded in an airport with his twenty-something daughter in Passengers, forcing the two to confront their strained relationship and a lifetime of emotional wounds. As their departure time is repeatedly delayed, Alexander Maksik examines the love between a parent and child in unlikely circumstances, and what it takes to protect ourselves and our loved ones as the world collapses around us.
Publishers submitted a total of 451 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction. The judges for Fiction are Matt Bell, Caro De Robertis (Chair), Danielle King, Akhil Sharma, and Diane Wilson. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.
2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction:
Hannah Lillith Assadi, Paradiso 17
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Kimberly Blaeser, Red Ants
Counterpoint Press
Edwidge Danticat, Dèy
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Julián Delgado Lopera, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company
Louise Erdrich, Python’s Kiss
Harper / HarperCollins Publishers
Marlon James, The Disappearers
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Valeria Luiselli, Beginning Middle End
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Alexander Maksik, Passengers
Europa Editions
Kenan Orhan, The Renovation
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Morgan Thomas, Mad Eden
MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
