National Book Award nominations are out: ‘The Vanishing Half’ is on longlist

Two of the summer’s most talked-about novels, Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half” and Megha Majumdar’s “A Burning,” are on the National Book Awards fiction longlist. Judges also nominated the story collection “If I Had Two Wings” by Randall Kenan, who died in August.

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Friday’s list concludes a week during which the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, announced nominees for translation, poetry, young people’s literature and nonfiction. On Oct. 6, the lists will be narrowed from 10 to five books in each category. Winners will be announced Nov. 18, with honorary medals being awarded to novelist Walter Mosley and to the late Simon & Schuster Chief Executive Carolyn Reidy, whose husband will accept on her behalf.

Many of the fiction nominees are younger authors, under age 50, with a handful or less of published works. Two books are debut novels: “The Burning,” the story of a woman in India who is accused of terrorism, and Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain,” a family saga set in Glasgow.

Others on the fiction list include Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind,” Christopher Beha’s “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts,” Lydia Millet’s “A Children’s Bible” and Deesha Philyaw’s “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.” Also nominated were Vanessa Veselka’s “The Great Offshore Grounds” and Charles Yu‘s “Interior Chinatown.”

Some off the year’s most anticipated works did not make the list, including Marilynne Robinson’s “Jack,” Ayad Akhtar’s “Homeland Elegies” and Sigrid Nunez‘s “What Are You Going Through,” her first novel since winning the National Book Award two years ago for “The Friend.”