I happily admit to having a special soft spot in my heart for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, but that shouldn’t detract from the other book awards out there–particularly because they offer so many great reading recommendations to us hungry readers looking for something new to try!

As we discussed last year, the National Book Awards have (and continue to have) some identity issues.  They were originally imagined to be some kind of rival to the Academy Awards, before making the realization that, and I quote, “Book people are really not actors”.  And while the award committee are very much trying to reinvent the award into something to rival the Man Booker in terms of prestige and gravitas, there is still a fairly high reliance on celebrity and flashy parties, rather than on the books.

We, at the Free For All, however, are always All About the Books, so let’s focus on the best part of the National Book Awards, and get to the long-lists for Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature, which was announced last Friday.  A reminder: the National Book Award is only for books written in English and published by American publishers, so this list usually looks much different to other fiction award lists.  The short list will be announced on October 13,  and the Winners will be announced on November 16:

FICTION:

• Chris Bachelder: The Throwback Special 
• Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You 
• Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
• Paulette Jiles, News of the World
• Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs
• Elizabeth McKenzie, The Portable Veblen (Also a Finalist for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction!)
• Lydia Millet, Sweet Lamb of Heaven
• Brad Watson, Miss Jane
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn 

NON-FICTION:

• Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
• Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
• Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
• Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  
• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
  
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
  
• Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
• Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America 
• Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition
• Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

POETRY:

• Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human
• Rita Dove, Collected Poems 1974 – 2004 
• Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics
• Donald Hall, The Selected Poems of Donald Hall 
• Jay Hopler, The Abridged History of Rainfall
• Donika Kelly, Bestiary
• Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade
• Solmaz Sharif, Look
• Monica Youn, Blackacre
• Kevin Young, Blue Laws 

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE:

• Kwame Alexander, Booked
• Kate DiCamillo, Raymie Nightingale 
• John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (Artist), March: Book Three 
• Grace Lin, When the Sea Turned to Silver
• Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours 
• Meg Medina, Burn Baby Burn 
• Sara Pennypacker & Jon Klassen (Illustrator), Pax
• Jason Reynolds, Ghost
• Caren Stelson, Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor’s Story 
• Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star 

No.  I didn’t set an alert on my phone to let me know when this list was actually announced.  Only a really crazy book nerd would do that.  Oh…wait….

But this morning, the good judges of the Man Book Prizes handed down their shortlist, showing which six books had been selected from their previously-compiled baker’s dozen of novels to compete for the ultimate prize, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.  Each author whose book made the shortlist receives a prize of £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.  Take a look and see what you think, or come on down to the Library and meet these books for yourself!

The Sellout (Published by Oneworld): Named by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2015, American author Paul Beatty’s novel focuses on a young man growing up in the southern outskirts of Los Angeles with his single father, a controversial sociologist, and serving as the subject in a number of racially charged psychological studies.  When his father dies, leaving nothing of merit or financial use behind, our narrator, in a desperate bid to save his hometown, decides it is time to re-instate slavery, and attempts to segregate his local high school, a move than lands him before the Supreme Court, in a blisteringly dark, satirical tale that the Los Angeles Times called “among the most important and difficult American novels written in the 21st century . . . a bruising novel that readers will likely never forget.”

Hot Milk (Published by Hamish Hamilton): British author Deborah Levy has been short-listed for the Man Booker previously for her novel Swimming Home, which focuses on issues of mental health and family interactions.  Her current work looks at the relationships between mothers and daughters, as Sofia, a young anthropologist, tries to come to terms with her mother, and the inexplicable illness from which she suffers.  Eager to abandon her own responsibilities for a bit, Sofia accompanies her mother to Spain to consult with a world-famous physician.  However, the longer they stay in Spain, the more suspicious Sofia grows of the doctors’ methods and her mother’s condition, leading her on an investigation into her mother’s symptoms and past to find the real answers to the symptoms that have weighed down both their lives, in a book that Publisher’s Weekly called “A singular read . . . Levy has crafted a great character in Sofia, and witnessing a pivotal moment in her life is a pleasure.”

 His Bloody Project (Published by Contraband): This book, unfortunately, will not be coming out in the US until November, but I’ve already got a standing order here at the Library, and I was fortunate enough to grab a copy of this during my recent adventuring, and can tell you, it’s most definitely a book to put on your calendar.  Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet’s novel is ostensibly a collection of documents he discovered while studying his family’s history–namely, a  brutal triple murder committed in a remote Scottish farming community in 1869 by one of Burnet’s (fictional) ancestors.  Five minutes with this book, however, and you’ll forget that this isn’t real testimony in a real trial in an actual historic record, and find yourself drawn into a story that seems at once so obvious and straightforward, and yet leaves you with so many questions and suspicions and doubts.  Very few people thought this book would make it to the short-list, but I’m really glad it did, because, as The Scotsman noted, it really is “one of the most convincing and engrossing novels of the year.”

Eileen (Published by Jonathan Cape): Not only can we be excited about this book as  a Man Booker Short Listed novel, but we can also celebrated because author Ottessa Moshfegh is a Boston-born local author, as well (yay!).  Set in a coastal New England town in the early 1960’s, Moshfegh’s book focuses on Eileen, a woman trapped between her job at a local boy’s prison, and her home, where she cares for her alcoholic father, with nothing for herself but her dreams of escape and fantasies of larceny.  Things begin to change when Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counselor at the prison.  Eileen’s devotion to Rebecca grows to be something absolute, and she is overjoyed to find that a mutual friendship is emerging between them.  But soon, Eileen’s loyalty to Rebecca leads her into complicity in a crime wildly outside the realms of her previous imaginings.   As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “When the denouement comes, it’s as shocking as it is thrilling. Part of the pleasure of the book (besides the almost killing tension) is that Eileen is mordantly funny . . . a truly original character who is gloriously unlikable, dirty, startling — and as ferociously human as the novel that bears her name.”

All That Man Is (Published by Jonathan Cape): This book will be released in the US on October 4, and will be on our shelves shortly thereafter.  Canadian author David Szalay’s has crafted a thoroughly unique and fascinating collection of stories here, linked through their overall purpose, rather than their characters or content.  He tells of nine men, all at various stages of their life,  each far from home, and each engaged in a quest to discover his purpose in life.  From their various locations across Europe, each man, individually may be isolated, but together, each of these stories tells us something powerful about what it means to be alive, to be human, and to exist at a certain age, creating a work that, as a whole, is immediate, searching, and constantly surprising.  Because each of these stories is a contained unit, Szalay is able to change local, characters and tone easily, making this a book the London Review of Books called “Cleverly conceived, authoritative, timely and (in a good way) crushing. . . . There is a cheerful and ghastly sordidness to everything…and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Published by Granta Books): Canadian author Madeleine Thien’s novel will be published in the US on October 11, so you won’t have too long a wait for this novel that deals on one level with families and memory, and on another with the history of modern China, and the ways in which large-scale events can shape the smallest aspects of our lives.  At the heart of the book are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming, growing up in present-day Vancouver.  As their relationship grows, Marie tries to piece together the stories that have brought both women to this point in their lives.  Her quest reveals the history of her own father, a  mysterious but undeniably talented pianist, Ai-Ming’s father, a shy and brilliant composer, and a violin prodigy named Zhuli were forced to re-conceive of themselves and their artistic ambitions during the massive upheavals of Maos’s Cultural Revolution, the protests and Tienanmen Square, and how the choices they made led these two remarkable women to their current moment.  At once epic in its scope and deeply personal in its consequences, The Guardian  called this book “A moving and extraordinary evocation of the 20th-century tragedy of China, and deserves to cement Thien’s reputation as an important and compelling writer.”

So there you have it, dear readers: this year’s Man Book Prize Shortlist.  Place your bets, make your predictions and get reading! We’ll be announcing the winner of the Man Book Prize on October 25th!