booked and busy Sept. 13, 2024

The National Book Foundation’s 2024 Fiction Longlist

Portrait of Emma Alpern

By Emma Alpern, a senior copy editor at New York who writes about culture and food

95th Annual Academy Awards - Red Carpet

Miranda July. Photo: Getty Images

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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The National Book Foundation’s 2024 Fiction Longlist

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