This week, The New Yorker introduced the longlists for the 2020 Nationwide Guide Awards. Earlier, we offered the lists for Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction.
Douglas Stuart’s novel “Shuggie Bain,” which traces the lifetime of a boy with an alcoholic mom, is a queer coming-of-age story, an intimate research of familial bonds, and, in the author’s words, a “love story to Glasgow,” town the place he grew up. “Shuggie Bain” is one among three débuts on the longlist for this 12 months’s Nationwide Guide Award for Fiction. “The Secret Lives of Church Girls,” a narrative assortment by Deesha Philyaw, narrates experiences of Black girls throughout areas and generations, mapping want and friendship throughout the confines of non secular communities. “A Burning,” Megha Majumdar’s novel set in present-day India, begins with a terrorist assault at a practice station and unfurls into a fancy story of poverty, corruption, and injustice.
Different contenders embrace Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half,” which follows a pair of twins, each racially ambiguous Black girls, whose lives diverge when one chooses to move as white; Charles Yu’s “Inside Chinatown,” a satirical novel that skewers Hollywood’s hackneyed depictions of Asians; and Rumaan Alam’s “Depart the World Behind,” about two households, one Black and one white, who discover themselves stranded in a rental trip house when a blackout shuts down New York Metropolis. Lydia Millet is the one nominee whose work has been beforehand long-listed for the award. The complete listing is beneath.
Rumaan Alam, “Leave the World Behind”
Ecco / HarperCollins Publishers
Christopher Beha, “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts”
Tin Home Books
Brit Bennett, “The Vanishing Half”
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random Home
Randall Kenan, “If I Had Two Wings”
W. W. Norton & Firm
Megha Majumdar, “A Burning”
Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random Home
Lydia Millet, “A Children’s Bible”
W. W. Norton & Firm
Deesha Philyaw, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies”
West Virginia College Press
Douglas Stuart, “Shuggie Bain”
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic
Vanessa Veselka, “The Great Offshore Grounds”
Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random Home
Charles Yu, “Interior Chinatown”
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random Home
The judges for the class this 12 months are Cristina Henríquez, the creator of “The Book of Unknown Americans”; Keaton Patterson, of Brazos Bookstore, in Houston; Laird Hunt, the creator of “Zorrie,” who teaches at Brown College; Rebecca Makkai, whose novel “The Great Believers” was a finalist for the 2018 Nationwide Guide Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and Roxane Homosexual, the creator of “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger.”
