This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2017 National Book Awards. Earlier this week, we shared the lists in the categories of Young People’s Literature and Poetry. Today, we present the ten contenders for Nonfiction. Check back tomorrow for Fiction.
Kevin Young was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2003, and he was on the longlist in that category last year. (In November, he will become the new poetry editor of The New Yorker.) This year, he is on the longlist in Nonfiction, for “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.”
He’s joined on the list by David Grann, a New Yorker staff writer, long-listed for the first time, for “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.” (You can read an excerpt of that book on this Web site.) The longlist also includes one previous winner of the National Book Award: Frances FitzGerald, who received the honor, in 1973, for “Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.” (That book also won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize.) Forty-four years later, FitzGerald is in contention again, for “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.”
The full list is below.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless
Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona
Judge”
37 INK / Atria / Simon & Schuster
Frances FitzGerald, “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America” Simon & Schuster
James Forman, Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in
Black
America”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Macmillan
Masha Gessen, “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed
Russia”
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
David Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the
Birth of the
F.B.I.”
Doubleday / Penguin Random House
Naomi Klein, “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics
and Winning the World We
Need”
Haymarket Books
Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the
Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for
America”
Viking / Penguin Random House
Richard Rothstein, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How
Our Government Segregated
America”
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company
Timothy B. Tyson, “The Blood of Emmett
Till”
Simon & Schuster
Kevin Young, “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists,
Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake
News”
Graywolf Press
The judges for the category this year are Steve Bercu, the owner of BookPeople, in Austin, and the former president of the American Booksellers Association; Jeff Chang, the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, at Stanford University, and, most recently, the author of “We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation”; Paula J. Giddings, the Elizabeth A. Woodson Professor of Africana Studies, at Smith College, and the author, most recently, of “Ida: A Sword Among Lions”; Ruth Franklin, whose most recent book is “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life”; and Valeria Luiselli, the author of “The Story of My Teeth” and “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” and a 2014 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honoree.
National Book Awards finalists will be announced on October 4th, and winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 15th.
