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)
