The 2025 National Book Awards Longlist

This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2025 National Book Awards, including Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction. To receive new short stories, criticism, and coverage of the literary world, sign up for our Books & Fiction newsletter.

Fiction

This year’s longlist includes five books by writers who have published short fiction in The New Yorker: Susan Choi, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Karen Russell, Bryan Washington, and Joy Williams. Two contenders, Kevin Moffett’s “Only Son” and Ethan Rutherford’s “North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther,” are first novels. Eight of the authors have been previously recognized by the National Book Awards.

Rabih Alameddine, “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)”
Grove / Grove Atlantic

Susan Choi, “Flashlight”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Macmillan

Angela Flournoy, “The Wilderness”
Mariner / HarperCollins

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “The Sisters”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Macmillan

Megha Majumdar, “A Guardian and a Thief”
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Kevin Moffett, “Only Son”
McSweeney’s

Karen Russell, “The Antidote”
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Ethan Rutherford, “North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther”
A Strange Object / Deep Vellum

Bryan Washington, “Palaver”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Macmillan

Joy Williams, “The Pelican Child”
Knopf / Penguin Random House

The judges for the category this year are Rumaan Alam, whose 2020 book “Leave the World Behind” was a National Book Award finalist; Debra Magpie Earling, author of “Perma Red” and “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea”; Attica Locke, whose books include “Guide Me Home” and “Black Water Rising”; Elizabeth McCracken, whose books “Thunderstruck & Other Stories,” “The Souvenir Museum,” and “The Giant’s House” have been honored by the National Book Awards; and Cody Morrison, a bookseller at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.

Nonfiction

In March, The New Yorker published an excerpt from “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Yiyun Li’s memoir of losing her two sons, James and Vincent, to suicide. “There is no good way to say this: words fall short,” Li writes about James’s death, turning over the familiar phrases that tend to accompany such events. “Still, these two clichés speak an irrefutable truth. Anything I write for James is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later, there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence.” Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” a polemic against Western complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza, similarly contends with the limits of language in the face of death. Both titles appear on this year’s longlist, which includes memoir and reportage from Vietnam, Russia, and Iran. All ten authors are being honored by the National Book Awards for the first time.