National Book Award finalists span continents and tackle identity, justice and war

NEW YORK (AP) — Fiction by Edwidge Danticat, Valeria Luiselli and Karl Ove Knausgaard are among this year’s finalists for the National Book Awards, with many of the books taking on such contentious issues as gender identity, criminal justice and the Middle East.

Tuesday’s announcement by the National Book Foundation of five nominees in each of five competitive categories has at least one notable omission: Marlon James’ “The Disappearers,” a Booker Prize finalist praised by The New York Times as among the century’s best releases. James’ novel, centered around the vicious beating of a group of gay men in Jamaica in the 1980s, had been on the National Book Awards fiction longlist of 10 released last month.

Winners, each of whom receive $10,000, will be revealed during a Nov. 18 dinner ceremony in Manhattan. Honorary medals will be presented to Salman Rushdie and Perri Klass.

Danticat’s “Dèy” and Luiselli’s “Beginning Middle End” are fiction finalists in a category of wide-ranging characters, subjects and locations. Danticat’s story of a mass shooting attack and its aftermath takes place in Miami, Haiti and Brooklyn, while Hannah Lillith Assadi’s “Paradiso 17” follows the worldwide journey of an exiled Palestinian. Luiselli’s family narrative spans generations and continents and Julián Delgado Lopera’s “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You” is set in Colombia. In Morgan Thomas’ “Mad Eden,” a transgender healthcare worker in Florida struggles for stability in an unfriendly world.

Knausgaard, the Norwegian author with a wide international following, is a finalist in the translation category for “The School of Night,” translated by Martin Aitken. Other nominees include Vicente Luis Mora’s “Centroeuropa,” translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery; Intan Paramaditha’s “Night of a Thousand Hells,” translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao; Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s “Pure Men,” translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud; and Samar Yazbek’s “Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza,” translated from the Arabic by Leri Price.

In nonfiction, Colin Asher is a finalist for “The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music,” Abdelrahman ElGendy for “Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming,” Camonghne Felix for “Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom,” Sara Nović for “Mother Tongue” and Joseph Osmundson for “Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.”

David Levithan, a finalist for young people’s literature, is among a small circle of book editors who also have accomplished careers as authors, including Jenny Jackson at Alfred A. Knopf and Jill Bialosky at W.W. Norton & Company. Levithan is an editorial director at Scholastic and a prolific writer nominated this year for “The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America,” a collaboration with Gabriel Duckels.

The other young people’s literature finalists are Elana K. Arnold’s “Holloway,” Tae Keller’s “When Tomorrow Burns,” Keala Kendall’s “That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic” and Julian Randall’s “Shook.”

In poetry, the nominees are Victoria Chang’s “Tree of Knowledge,” Carolina Ebeid’s “Hide,” Brenda Hillman’s “Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation,” Fady Joudah’s “Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza” and Susan Stewart’s “Bramble.”