The New Yorker’s Coverage of the 2026 National Book Award Fiction Nominees
All week, The New Yorker has been exclusively announcing the National Book Award longlists. Today, the fiction list has arrived. It includes many works that our critics have commented on, and some that have even been excerpted in the magazine.
It should come as no surprise that one of the nominees is Marlon James’s tour de force “The Disappearers,” which was also nominated for a Booker Prize this spring and was praised by Dwight Garner, in an ecstatic Times review, as “the novel of the decade, if not the century.” Our critic Katy Waldman, who appreciated the book’s strengths, wrote in her review that it “uses the tricks of fiction to pull off something extremely difficult: giving full weight to tragedy and injustice without implying that some lives are over before they’ve begun.”
“Dèy,” by Edwidge Danticat, which in addition to being a National Book Award nominee is featured on our list of the best books of 2026 so far, is about a woman who survives a mass shooting but tells no one, forcing the reader to face the normalcy of such violence. Also among our favorites of the year is Kenan Orhan’s “The Renovation,” in which a woman’s bathroom transforms into a cell in a Turkish prison, “a haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation.” And Hannah Lillith Assadi’s “Paradiso 17,” about a Palestinian man displaced by the Nakba, is another included on both the longlist and our list: “A wonderfully sprawling, almost picaresque story, which gains power from her resistance to passing simple judgment on her protagonist.”
A story drawn from another book on the longlist, Valeria Luiselli’s “Beginning Middle End,” was originally published in our pages. Narrated by a woman on a post-divorce road trip through Sicily with her daughter, the story is a meditation on a question the mother asks: “What would you say makes a good beginning?” In an interview with our editor Nina Mesfin, Luiselli offered some examples of her own favorite beginnings in literature, including “A barometric low hung over the Atlantic,” from Robert Musil’s “Man Without Qualities.” Mesfin recently told me that “ ‘Beginning Middle End’ is not just a novel but an experience.”
Five of the thirteen stories in Louise Erdrich’s nominated collection, “Python’s Kiss,” were also first published in The New Yorker. “Poignant, funny, and always surprising,” our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, writes, “the stories twist, then twist again, leaving you somewhere you’d never guessed you were going.” She adds that, in one of those twists, the book places its “most heartbreaking musing on loss,” from the story “Love of My Days,” in the mind of a horse who is grieving his mother and harness-mate. “When half of you is gone,” he thinks, “the half left behind begins its long descent into a cold strange barn.”
My own favorite moment from Erdrich’s collection comes in “Nero,” which The New Yorker published in 2012. It’s a simple story, in some ways, about what we learn by watching other animals. A young girl is sent to stay for a few weeks with her grandparents, who own a slaughterhouse. Her chore while there is to feed their half-wild guard dog the entrails of the butchered carcasses—“throw down the guts if he rushes at you,” her grandmother advises. Backing out of the yard, as instructed, the girl catches the dog’s gaze: “As I looked into his eyes, which were the same brownish gold as mine, I had my first sensation of self-awareness. I realized that my human body, my human life, was arbitrary. I could have been a dog.” In the grip of “an exhilarating sadness,” she feels “the first intimations of sympathy for another form of creation.” Like all epiphanies, it’s transitory, but it leaves its mark—as do many of these nominated books.
