The National Book Foundation’s 2024 Longlist for Fiction includes three debut novels, two short-story collections, and what might be the first great piece of incel literature, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. Finalists for the award honoring works of fiction follow this week’s earlier longlist announcements for nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature. Fiction judges Jamie Ford, Lauren Groff, Zeyn Joukhadar, Chawa Magaña, and Reginald McKnight assessed a total of 473 submissions, eventually narrowing the list down to ten books.
Included on the list is Miranda July’s novel All Fours, about a 45-year-old married woman who forgoes a road trip after driving just a few miles from home, holes up in a hotel room, and pursues a relationship with a younger man. In Kaveh Akbar’s debut, Martyr!, the poet Cyrus Shams, brought from Iran to the Midwest as a baby, unearths the truth about his mother. James, by Percival Everett, is a sly retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner, reworks the spy thriller for a louche protagonist embedded within a community of French activists. Both she and the debut novelist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of the longlisted Catalina, have been nominated for National Book Awards in the past: Kushner for 2008’s Telex From Cuba and 2013’s The Flamethrowers, and Villavicencio for her reported memoir, The Undocumented Americans, in 2020.
The National Book Award finalists in all categories will be announced on October 1. Winners will be revealed at the awards ceremony, held in New York on November 20, so you have lots of time to read up. Below, the full list.
Ghostroots, by ’Pemi Aguda
Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar
The Most, by Jessica Anthony
Catalina, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
James, by Percival Everett
All Fours, by Miranda July
Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner
My Friends, by Hisham Matar
Yr Dead, by Sam Sax
Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte
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