National Book Award for Fiction 2024

In which I share my initial thoughts, after finishing this year's fiction longlist!

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Last Friday, the literary world and those obsessed with lists refreshed their New Yorker pages in anticipation of the National Book Award Fiction longlist. For anyone who’s been following the award for a while, you might know that the last two longlists have been a bit polarizing. in 2022, eight of the ten books listed were debuts, which led many to argue that the award was choosing to overlook established writers, and in 2023, people argued that many of the books just weren’t that memorable. Even I have written about my discontent with the last few longlists, and I’d consider myself this awards number one fan. Either way, I had no doubts that this year’s list would be a vast improvement, because my queen, Lauren Groff, was this year’s Fiction chair.

She did not disappoint! Earlier this week, I finished reading the longlist, and I am here to say that this might be one of the more exciting lists we’ve seen. While not every book has been for me as a reader, each one has done new and exciting things within the realm of fiction, and I am so excited to dive in and give you my initial thoughts now that I have read them all.

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One of the first books I read this year was Martyr! by poet Kaveh Akbar—this debut novel follows a young man named Cyrus who has an obsession with death and martyrdom. I was immediately taken with the narrative voice, thrilled over the sentences and the interesting construction, and when I realized this was a queer story, I was completely sold. My favorite relationship in this book was between Cyrus and Zee—I found their dynamic endearing, and I think the way Akbar explored their relationship was very honest and tender. I found the way Akbar depicted Cyrus’s struggles with addiction to be accurate to the experiences I’ve witnessed with others in my own life, and in some ways, I feel like it offered clarity to some of the actions people around me took while abusing various substances. I think a lot of the big ideas being toyed with throughout the book come from a writer of clear vision, never muddied by an attempt to just echo the ideas we’re seeing in so many works right now. There were elements of the book that didn’t quite come together for me, something that almost always happens with ambitious debuts, but I would always choose a flawed book that takes big swings than a technically perfect book that plays it safe.

James was the second book I read from the longlist, all the way back in February—I’ve been a fan of Percival Everett for a little while now, and think it’s a shame so much of his earlier work went under the radar. I’m glad to see his latest books getting so much buzz now. James is a retelling/reimagining/reconsideration of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved black man who traveled with Huck down the Mississippi River. True confession, my greatest association with this story is in a cutaway scene in Easy A with Emma Stone—if you know, you know—but once I disassociated this book from that context, I thought it was just genius. Everett has such a command of story, and all of his books have a strong voice, are all so playful, and smart in a way that never comes across as pompous or that holds the reader at arms length. I loved the way Everett wrote of James interacting with imaginary Voltaire and having discussions about human rights, conversations that were both profound and ridiculously funny. My friend Bernie Lombardi predicted this to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2025, and I think it likely will. It’s a quintessentially American story, and it’s one of Everett’s best.

The next book I read was All Fours by Miranda July. I was a fan of July’s short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, but avoided The First Bad Man when it came out because some pretentious prick recommended it to me and I had a hard time breaking the association. I actually ended up reading The First Bad Man just before I got All Fours, and I have to say, it’s a beautiful, hilarious, devastating novel, and I highly recommend. To me, All Fours actually feels like a culmination of July’s work to date, like this book captured exactly what she’s been wanting to say for most of her career. While the book is super voicey, a little snarky, much like the works of Melissa Broder and Jen Beagin, there’s something so particular to July’s sentences, and such a richness of depth to the narrator of this book. The book follows an unnamed narrator as she sets off on a cross country road trip, only to stall out and begin a sexless love affair. It’s about a lot more than that, but that alone was what had me hooked. I just think there’s something really exciting and unique about what July is doing here. She explores new ideas of marriage and parenting a queer child and realizing your queerness at a later age, but none of it ever reads like conservative white lady discovery. This is a person who has lived in the world self actualizing. While the book could fall into the “sad girl lit” category in some ways (it has a lot of the elements traditionally associated with these works), it’s more mature and lived in, and July never takes the path you initially expect.

I know All Fours has been more polarizing than some of the other books on this longlist—I’ve seen criticism around the book, calling it fatphobic, or saying that the book doesn’t depict queerness in a way that resonated with queer readers—and I can’t say whether or not the people who think those things are right or wrong. To me, the queer element felt honest and complicated, and regarding the claims of fatphobia, I didn’t notice any of that at the time (I also know people who took similar issue with descriptions of fatness in Broder’s Milk Fed, which I personally didn’t read as fatphobic.) This is one of those things where I feel like I’d need to revisit the book at some point and consider those criticisms to really have any input, but I also like that such a polarizing read has made its way onto the longlist. Feels like old times.

I read My Friends by Hisham Matar after it made the Booker longlist, but Bernie had been telling me to read it all year, saying it was in his top ten. I’ll be honest, I hated this book’s cover, and yes, I do sometimes judge books by their covers. But when I read what the book was about—the book explores the lives of three young Libyan men, exiles living in London—I became intrigued. From the opening paragraph, I fell in love with this book. There’s something about the way Matar writes about friendship that just cut deep into my heart, and so much of this book reminded me of another favorite, Open City by Teju Cole. Matar moves through time and narrative so fluidly, with such a real understanding of stream of consciousness, writing it in a way that feels realistic to the mind’s wanderings but without it ever seeming too convoluted to follow. This ended up being one of my favorite books of this year so far, and every time I think of it, it makes my heart burst.

After that, I read Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. Funnily enough, I attended an event with Lauren Groff a few months ago where she raved about this book, which had me really excited for it, despite my lukewarm reception to The Flamethrowers. Then, a few weeks before I read it, I got wind that Brandon Taylor hated it, and wasn’t sure where I would land. I think I might land somewhere in the middle of these two. I didn’t hate it, and in fact, there were many elements I loved about this book. I appreciated how weird this book is, not just in it’s subject matter but in its unpredictable structure. Kushner has a mind that I can’t quite comprehend, and I find that exciting. She also wrote this protagonist who describes women in the way people always make fun of male writers for doing—lots of “breasted boobily” lines. I found the spy plotline investing and interesting, am still trying to connect some of the various other threads, but I also don’t know if this is a book that’s supposed to give us a tidy conclusion, or tie up every loose thread. A lot of literary fiction is a bit messier, like that.

Those were the five books I’d read before the longlist dropped—I was excited to see them, even the ones I wasn’t completely obsessed with, because I found them to make an exciting list of books, all experimenting and trying new things, taking risks that not a lot of other books have been doing lately.

Once the longlist dropped, I started with the book I knew the most about, Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. This was a book I’d seen all over bookstagram when it first came out, and while I loved her non-fiction book, The Undocumented Americans, I hadn’t really heard as much buzz about this one. This is a very slim book, following the titular character as she navigates her last year in Harvard, trying to figure out what to do once she graduates, since she’s undocumented and knows it will present various obstacles in her future. I loved the voice of this one—I think Villavicencio really knows how to connect to a reader through her narrative voice—and I found the story captivating and different enough from other similar stories to stand out. I am still deciding how I feel about the style choice, because the book often read a bit essayistic, almost like reportage, which didn’t hinder my reading experience but did sometimes leave me wishing we had a little more time existing in certain moments. I think this is something that’s actually brought up within the text, so I think it’s intentional, but just something I’m contemplating.

My next read was The Most by Jessica Anthony, a book set over the course of a day, as a woman refuses to get out of the pool. This book gave me major Revolutionary Road vibes—it’s set in the 50s and I appreciated how Anthony captured the style of that period without it ever feeling like someone trying to write a fifties book in the more obvious ways. Anthony does a lot in this little book, around 130 pages, and I really enjoyed it, though I’m not really sure if it actually does much new. I haven’t talked with anyone else about this book yet, so I could be overlooking something. This is the one bad part about reading books within the context of an award, is asking why it earns its place. I guess one could argue that the book just does everything so well. It marries its themes and plot elements together seemlessly, and it all flows so smoothly. It feels real and fully realized, the entirety of a marriage existing in this sliver of text. For that, I can see the justification for its inclusion. And anyway, not everything has to say something new if it’s at least saying the same thing but with more precision.

The book that surprisingly (given that I follow the author on social media) wasn’t on my radar was YR DEAD by Sam Sax. There’s a lot I enjoyed about this book, set during the period of time between when the narrator lights themself on fire until they die, one of which is how inventive it is. I said this earlier, but I love a book that takes big swings, and this book is doing a lot of interesting things structurally. Most poets write books that do well with structural play, and also tend to write glorious sentences, and most of Sax’s sentences are exciting and evocative. They also capture queer desire in a way that feels real and so specific to a modern queer sensibility. While I do think the book falls apart in certain moments, I also don’t necessarily think the book wants to hold itself together. It sometimes feels a little off its hinges on purpose. There are small parts that reminded me of Edinburgh by Alexander Chee ( a book i love), and other parts that remind me of the Jenny Offill type books, mostly vignettes. I have gotten a little bit worn out on these, just because I have read so many of them recently, but that’s not a flaw of the book, just more a reader fatigue. Overall, I think this is an exciting addition to the list.

I eventually went on to read Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda, the one book on the list that’s clearly defined as a short story collection. I am a big fan of short stories, and I thought this collection was just fantastic. It’s compelling and weird and I loved the themes and ideas it explores. I believe all of the stories take place in Lagos, if I’m remembering correctly. Aguda really inhabits the bodies of her characters, exploring the physical in ways that a lot of fiction seems to forget to do nowadays. At times it almost comes close to body horror, in a way, just the realization of how bodies exist, especially for women—I keep thinking about that new Demi Moore movie and conversations around body horror and feminist texts and I’m sure someone will write a great essay about all of those things in the context of this book, at some point. The writing is really strong, the stories are all compelling and interesting, and I think this is one of those books I will revisit many times.

The last book I read was Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, a novel in stories about a bunch of people getting rejected for various reasons. I saw one tweet describe this book as the first “incel” novel, which I thought was funny and pretty accurate. I loved most of this book, especially the first half, which I thought was really strong and kept pivoting into new and unexpected directions. The voices of the various characters are all engaging, and Tulathimutte leans into the weirdness in ways that only elevate the material, making it work to greater effect than if someone had approached this through a more realist lens. I did feel like it became a bit repetitive by the time I reached the second half, and I found myself losing a bit of interest, but the last story really sold me on the book as a whole, and I think it’s exploring things in new and exciting ways. I can see this becoming a very buzzy book, good for book club discussion.

This is my quick overview of the list after having finished it—I’m sure my thoughts will evolve as I discuss the books with more people and consider elements of them that I hadn’t thought of on my first reading. But I think this is a pretty stellar list. I don’t think there’s a dud, and even when elements didn’t work for me, it felt more like a me issue than a book issue.

I’m really excited to see what other people think of the list as they read it. I want to revisit some of these books already, because I found them so engaging and interesting and fresh. I knew Lauren wouldn’t let us down! If you’ve read any of the books from the longlist, please report back your thoughts! I’m dying to know so I can discuss with everyone.

Anyway, that’s it for now.

Until next time,

XOXO