The Twenty-Five Books That Might Matter (or Might Not)

By Andy — 2026-10-07 — Literary News

The National Book Foundation has done its job. Five categories. Twenty-five shortlisted books. A bronze medal, five figures, and what amounts to the literary establishment's permission slip to be taken seriously.

Here's what's interesting about this year: Edwidge Danticat is back for a third time.

That alone tells you something. The woman writes novels about women bearing witness to violence—her new one, Dèy, involves a shooting in a Miami mall—and the judges keep calling her. Morgan Thomas gets noticed in the fiction category for her debut, Mad Eden, which manages the feat of being formally experimental while also tracking a patient navigator at a gender-affirming care center. Form meeting substance, more or less. It could have gone either way.

The nonfiction list reads like someone finally noticed that books can do more than one thing at once. Colin Asher's The Midnight Special weaves prison history through American music. Camonghne Felix published something she calls a declaration and a memoir in the same breath—Let the Poets Govern—which is either audacious or confused, and possibly both. Joseph Osmundson wrote about fatherhood and science and queerness. Actually, that's not quite right. He wrote about queerness while trying to become a father. The nonfiction category has always been where books get strange permission to be oblique.

Poetry. Five poets, each doing something different enough that you wonder how the judges didn't split into factions. Victoria Chang, Carolina Ebeid, Brenda Hillman (whose title is "Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation"—try saying that three times without reaching for your notes). Fady Joudah has submitted "Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza." Susan Stewart, who has been around for decades, lands here with Bramble. The poetry category is always where the strangest conversations happen.

Translated literature gets Karl Ove Knausgaard's The School of Night, which is worth noting simply because Knausgaard dominates bookshop tables and someone decided his latest work belonged in this particular room. Also here: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Intan Paramaditha, Samar Yazbek. A collection that suggests translation has finally stopped being the afterthought it used to be.

Young People's Literature—which is its own creature, frankly—includes Tae Keller, Keala Kendall, and David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels collaborating on "The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America." Nothing precious about it. Nothing apologetic either.

Winners get announced November 18th in New York. The rest of us get to read these books and decide for ourselves whether the judges were having a good day.

Source: "The winners in each of the five categories—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people's literature—will be announced at an awards ceremony on November 18." — Publishers Weekly