Novelist Gail Jones is a fiction nominee for the National Book Award, a rare established name on the list of 10 that feature eight debut works of fiction.
Jones was quoted on Friday for “The Birdcatcher,” an exploration of race, art, and marriage in which the Black American author travels to the island of Ibiza and lives with his married friends, one of whom plans to kill the other. is trying. Jones, 72, is the author of the novel “Corregidora,” one of the most acclaimed first books in recent memory, which came out in 1975. He has published sporadically in the following decades and last year broke a 20-year hiatus for the Pulitzer Prize novelist “Palmares”.
The National Book Foundation, which awards the prize, earlier this week announced a long list of 10 in young people’s literature, poetry, translation and non-fiction. The competing categories will be narrowed down to a list of five on October 4th, with the winners being announced during a November 16th ceremony featuring cartoonist Art Spiegelman and American Library Association executive director Tracy D. There will be honorary awards for the Hall.
The lists are evaluated by a panel of authors, critics and other members of the literary community. Among the books sidelined by fiction judges: Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House,” Lydia Millett’s “Dinosaurs,” Andrew Sean Greer’s “Less Is Lost” and Yiyun Lee’s “The Book of Goose.”
Besides Jones, Jamil Jan Kochai is the only nominee to have previously published a novel. He was cited for the collection “The Haunting of Haji Hotak and Other Stories” on Friday. The fiction list also includes two filmmakers: Fatima Asghar, author of “If They Come for Us”, author and co-producer of the Emmy-nominated “Brown Girls”; Ramona Emerson, who wrote and directed the documentary “The Mayors of Shiprocket,” is a National Book Award nominee for “Shutter.”
Three of the first books are story collections: “Nobody Gets Out Alive” by Leigh Newman, by Maritza K. Rubio’s “Maria, Maria and Other Stories” and Jonathan Escofri’s “If I Survive You,” an interconnected series of stories.
Other nominees are Sara Thankum Mathews’ “All This Can Be Different,” Tess Gunty’s “The Rabbit Hutch” and Alejandro Varela’s “The Town of Babylon,” released by Astra Publishing House, just two years earlier. Was established.