National Book Awards Pick Thomas Pynchon, Alice McDermott for Fiction Longlist

George Saunders, James McBride, Elizabeth Graver among the authors up for the prize

The National Book Awards released its long list for fiction on Thursday with the prestigious prize-giver singling out some of the literary world’s best known authors like Thomas Pynchon and Jhmupa Lahirir.

Pynchon was cited for “The Bleeding Edge,” an Internet-infused mystery, while Lahirir was singled out for “The Lowland,” a story of Bengali brothers growing up in Calcutta.

Other top names vying for the honor are Alice McDermott, for her dreamlike examination of a Brooklyn woman in “Someone”; George Saunders for his short story collection “Tenth of December”; and Rachel Kushner, for her tale of a peripatetic artist in “The Flamethrowers.”

Earlier this week the National Book Awards unveiled longlists for poetry, non-fiction and young people’s literature.

Finalists for the $10,000 prize will be announced on Oct. 16, and the winners will receive their honor on Nov. 20.

Here’s the complete list:

Tom Drury, Pacific (Grove Press)

Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point (Harper/HarperCollinsPublishers)

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)

Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth/Random House)

James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA)

Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group USA)

George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House)

Joan Silber, Fools (W.W. Norton & Company)

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