Edwidge Danticat has been here before, twice. Her stories Krik? Krak! made the fiction shortlist in 1995, and her memoir Brother, I’m Dying made the nonfiction one in 2007. On Tuesday, October 6, the National Book Foundation named her a finalist once more, for Dèy, a novel about a Haitian American real estate agent in Miami who survives a mass shooting and cannot quite bring herself to tell her family the truth. If there is such a thing as being owed a prize, Danticat may be owed this one.
Publishers entered 1,912 books this year. Twenty-five judges read them, a longlist of fifty appeared in September, and now five books remain in each of the five categories. Each winner receives $10,000, a bronze medal and a statue; each finalist gets $1,000 and a medal.
The fiction five
Danticat’s company is strong and wide-ranging. Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17 is the deathbed story of a man forced out of Palestine as a child in 1948 who spends the rest of his life looking for home. Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End follows a mother and daughter starting over across four generations and several languages. Julián Delgado Lopera’s Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is set in Bogotá in the 1990s, where a father and daughter must learn to live together after the mother’s death. Morgan Thomas’s Mad Eden, the only debut, interleaves the life of a trans healthcare worker with an online fantasy story of the same name.
The notable absence is Marlon James. The Disappearers, which is on the Booker shortlist in London and which The New York Times has called the novel of the decade, was on the American longlist in September and did not survive the cut. Judges are not obliged to agree with newspapers, and it is rather reassuring that they don’t.
The rest of the field
In translated literature, the best-known name is Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose The School of Night, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, follows a photographer from 1980s London to a retrospective in New York, haunted all the way. He faces Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Samar Yazbek, Intan Paramaditha and Vicente Luis Mora. Gaza is present in two categories, in Yazbek’s collection of testimony and in Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G in poetry, where Victoria Chang, Brenda Hillman, Carolina Ebeid and Susan Stewart are also finalists.
The nonfiction list leans towards memoir: Abdelrahman ElGendy on prison in Egypt, Sara Nović on deafness and motherhood, Joseph Osmundson on queer parenthood, and Camonghne Felix on how the language of poets might help us govern ourselves. The odd one out, in the best sense, is Colin Asher’s The Midnight Special, a history of American music recorded in prison. For young readers, David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels’ The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America sits beside novels by Elana K. Arnold, Tae Keller, Keala Kendall and Julian Randall.
The night itself
The 77th ceremony takes place on Wednesday, November 18, at Cipriani Wall Street, with Kyle MacLachlan as host and Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast as the musical guest. Salman Rushdie will receive the Foundation’s medal for lifetime contribution to American letters, and Perri Klass its Literarian Award. The finalists read at NYU Skirball the night before. The whole thing is streamed, so the rest of us can watch from the sofa, which is how most of literature is experienced anyway.
A word from the desk
Five fiction finalists, and five quite different corners of the world. We would be glad to see Danticat finally take the prize, but Luiselli is the one we keep thinking about. Either way, we will be watching on November 18.
News Editorial Desk, Pine Tree Shilling Publishing