Two debuts are still in the running for the National Book Awards. The National Book Foundation announced its 25 finalists on Tuesday morning, five in each of its five categories. The list includes Morgan Thomas's debut novel, Mad Eden, in Fiction, and Sara Nović's debut memoir, Mother Tongue, in Nonfiction.
When the longlists were published in September, eight of the fifty books were debuts by the Foundation's own descriptions, as RedSquibble counted on Sunday. The other six did not advance: Kenan Orhan's The Renovation and Kimberly Blaeser's Red Ants in Fiction, Jake Rose's JOAN in Poetry, Egana Djabbarova's My Dreadful Body, translated by Lisa C. Hayden, in Translated Literature, and Delali Adjoa's The Free Verse Society and T. A. Chan's The Celestial Seas in Young People's Literature.
Publishers submitted 1,912 books this year, the Foundation said, including 451 in Fiction and 727 in Nonfiction. Each finalist receives $1,000 and a bronze medal. Winners receive $10,000, a bronze medal and a statue, and will be announced at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 18.
Mad Eden, by Morgan Thomas (MCD)
The Foundation says the novel "blurs time and genre, interspersing the story of Ro—a trans healthcare worker who was recently diagnosed with autism—with excerpts from the eponymous online fantasy story, exploring what it means to seek joy and care in an increasingly hostile world." NPR, reporting the finalists, called it "a form-bending story following a patient navigator at a center providing gender-affirming care."
Thomas's first book was the story collection Manywhere. In an interview with Autostraddle in July, Thomas said the novel grew partly out of eight or nine years of working in public health, writing copy for health campaigns, and out of a period when that work suddenly drew "political attention and negative attention." Thomas wrote the book from 2022 into 2023 and sold it before the current administration took office, then, after a conversation with an editor, decided to fix the story firmly in 2023. "So suddenly, what's weird is that now it actually feels like Mad Eden is historical fiction even though it's literally about 2023, like three years ago," Thomas said.
The fantasy serial inside the book has its own constraint. Thomas told Autostraddle that it was written using only the words found in a single scientific article, "Autism as a Disorder of Prediction," and that it became "this sort of dragon fantasy fanfiction type of story."
Thomas faces Hannah Lillith Assadi's Paradiso 17, Edwidge Danticat's Dèy, Julián Delgado Lopera's Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You and Valeria Luiselli's Beginning Middle End. According to the Foundation, Assadi and Luiselli are past 5 Under 35 honorees, and Danticat was a finalist in 1995 and 2007, which makes her, in NPR's words, "now a three-time finalist."
"So suddenly, what's weird is that now it actually feels like Mad Eden is historical fiction even though it's literally about 2023, like three years ago."
Mother Tongue, by Sara Nović (Random House)
The Foundation's description follows Nović's hearing loss as a child, her place in the deaf community and her parenting of two young sons, one adopted and deaf and one biological and hearing, set alongside "a history of discrimination against deaf and disabled communities in the United States."
Speaking with NPR in May through an ASL translator, Nović explained the question behind the title. "What is a primary language? And how do you get one? I mean, I think I've always been obsessed with that idea," she said. Even the phrase posed a problem: "The sign for mother and the sign for tongue does not make sense as a phrase in ASL."
The other Nonfiction finalists are Colin Asher's The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, Abdelrahman ElGendy's Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming, Camonghne Felix's Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom and Joseph Osmundson's Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.
What Comes Next
All 25 finalists will read from their work on the evening of Tuesday, November 17, at NYU Skirball, at an event hosted by Traci Thomas of the podcast The Stacks. The ceremony the following night will be livestreamed on the Foundation's website and YouTube. Literary Hub has the full list of finalists in all five categories.
Sources: National Book Foundation, NPR, Literary Hub, Autostraddle. Book descriptions are drawn from the Foundation's finalist announcement.
Reported by the RedSquibble books desk from the publications and announcements linked in this story.
