NEW YORK – Salman Rushdie's memoir a bout his near-fatal stabbing, “Knife,” and Percival Everett's revisionist historical novel, “James," are among the finalists for the 75th annual National Book Awards. Others nominated include author-filmmaker Miranda July for her explicit novel on middle age, “All Fours,” and the celebrated Canadian poet Anne Carson for “Wrong Norma.”
On Tuesday, the National Book Foundation announced finalists in fiction, nonfiction, young people's literature, poetry and books in translation. Judges in each category pared long lists of 10 unveiled last month to five final selections. Winners will be announced during a Nov. 20 dinner ceremony in Manhattan, when honorary prizes will be presented to novelist Barbara Kingsolver and publisher-activist W. Paul Coates.
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In fiction, nominees besides “James” and “All Fours” are Pemi Aguda's debut story collection, “Ghostroots": Kaveh Akbar's debut novel, “Martyr!,” Hisham Matar's “My Friends,” a novel by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “The Return.”
Four of the five fiction books, including “James,” were published by Penguin Random House. Everett's novel, which re-tells “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the enslaved man Mark Twain had named Jim, is also a Booker Prize finalist and among the year's most acclaimed works. Among the books on the fiction long list that judges left out of the final choices was Rachel Kushner's “Creation Lake,” another Booker finalist.
Rushdie's “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” is a nonfiction finalist, along with Jason De León's “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” Eliza Griswold's “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church,” Kate Manne's “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia” and Deborah Jackson Taffa's “Whiskey Tender.”
“Knife” is the first National Book Award nomination for the 77-year-old Rushdie, who was living overseas and ineligible at the time he published the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight's Children's” and other works. A native of India who lived for years in London, Rushdie became a U.S. citizen in 2016. The prolific Everett, author of more than 20 books and the recipient of several awards, is also a first-time nominee.
The poetry list includes Carson's “Wrong Norma,” Fady Joudah's “(...),” m.s. RedCherries' debut collection “mother,” Diane Seuss' “Modern Poetry” and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's “Something About Living.” In young people's literature, the finalists are Violet Duncan's “Buffalo Dreamer,” Josh Galarza's “The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky,” Erin Entrada Kelly's “The First State of Being,” Shifa Saltagi Safadi's “Kareem Between” and Angela Shanté's “The Unboxing of a Black Girl.”
Two books originally written in Arabic are on the translated works list: Bothayna Al-Essa's “The Book Censor’s Library,” translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, and Samar Yazbek's “Where the Wind Calls Home,” translated by Leri Price. The other finalists are Linnea Axelsson's “Ædnan,” translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Fiston Mwanza Mujila's “The Villain’s Dance,” translated from the French by Roland Glasser, and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's “Taiwan Travelogue,” translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King."
Judging panels in each category made their selections from hundreds of submissions, with publishers nominating more than 1,900 books in all.
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This story corrects the spelling of Hisham Matar and the title of the book to "My Friends.''