Culture

The 2020 National Book Awards Longlist: Nonfiction


This week, The New Yorker will be announcing the longlists for the 2020 National Book Awards. So far, we’ve presented the lists for Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, and Poetry. Check back tomorrow morning for Fiction.

This year’s longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction includes two débuts that intersperse memoir with research and reportage. At the center of Michelle Bowdler’s “Is Rape a Crime?” is the horrific story of her own rape, in 1984; what follows is a damning examination of the justice system’s failures to investigate and prosecute sexual assaults. “The Undocumented Americans,” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, is both an autobiographical project and a story that sweeps across the U.S.

Other contenders for the award present frameworks that illuminate the workings of race and other vectors of power. Isabel Wilkerson offers a new theory of American hierarchy—one that draws from her studies of India and Nazi Germany—in “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” Frank B. Wilderson III, the author of “Afropessimism,” locates Black people in a state of perpetual slavery, arguing that Black death is foundational to human society.

Two books on the longlist, both works of history, were excerpted in The New Yorker: “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X,” by the late journalist Les Payne and his daughter, Tamara Payne, and “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future,” by the New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore. The full list is below.

Michelle Bowdler, “Is Rape a Crime?: A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto
Flatiron Books / Macmillan Publishers

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “The Undocumented Americans
One World / Penguin Random House

Jill Lepore, “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company

Les Payne and Tamara Payne, “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company

Claudio Saunt, “Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
W. W. Norton & Company

Jenn Shapland, “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Tin House Books

Jonathan C. Slaght, “Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

Jerald Walker, “How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
Mad Creek Books / The Ohio State University Press

Frank B. Wilderson III, “Afropessimism
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company

Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Random House / Penguin Random House

The judges for the category this year are James Goodman, a professor at Rutgers University, New York, whose book “Stories of Scottsboro” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Yunte Huang, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, whose book “Inseparable” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hannah Oliver Depp, the owner of Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Maryland; David Treuer, whose book “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” was a 2019 finalist for a National Book Award; and Terry Tempest Williams, the author of “Erosion: Essays of Undoing” and a writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School.



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