Salman Rushdie earned his first National Book Award nomination for his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Rushdie’s book, an account of the 2022 stabbing attack that seriously injured him, is being developed as a documentary.
Hanif Abdurraqib made the longlist for There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension; the author was previously longlisted for the prize for Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest and shortlisted for A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance.
Richard Slotkin, a two-time previous finalist (Regeneration Through Violence, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America) was named a finalist this time around for A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was longlisted for Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, alongside Rebecca Boyle for Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are; Jason De León for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling; and Eliza Griswold for Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church.
Also nominated were Kate Manne for Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia; Ernest Scheyder for The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives; and Deborah Jackson Taffa for Whiskey Tender.
The shortlist for the prize will be announced on Oct. 1, with the winner revealed at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 20.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
