2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS LONGLIST FOR FICTION

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1 RELEASE: SEPTEMBER 17, 2015 CONTACT: Sherrie Young 9:30 a.m. EDT National Book Foundation (212) /cell: (917) NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS LONGLIST FOR FICTION New York, NY (September 17, 2015) The National Book Foundation announces the Longlist for the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction. Finalists will be revealed on October 14. The Fiction Longlist includes a former National Book Award Finalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, and two titles that were included on the longlist of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Of the ten books on the list, four are story collections, and many center on family relationships Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction: Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family Scout Press/Simon & Schuster Karen E. Bender, Refund Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press Angela Flournoy, The Turner House Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles Random House/Penguin Random House

2 T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville William Morrow/HarperCollins Edith Pearlman, Honeydew Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life Doubleday/Penguin Random House Nell Zink, Mislaid The Ecco Press/HarperCollins Author Biographies: Jesse Ball is the author of four previous novels, including Silence Once Begun and Samedi the Deafness, and several works of verse, bestiaries, and sketchbooks. He was a finalist for the 2015 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Ball received an NEA creative writing fellowship in 2014 and the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize; his verse has been included in the Best American Poetry series. He gives classes on general practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago s Master of Fine Arts Writing program. Karen E. Bender is the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Story, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and other magazines. Her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year s Best. She has won two Pushcart prizes and grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She co-edited the anthology Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion. She has taught creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Tunghai University in Taiwan. She lives in North Carolina. Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. He has written for The New York Times, Lapham s

3 Quarterly, New York magazine, The Guardian, and Harper s Bazaar. Did You Ever Have a Family was Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Angela Flournoy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University. The Turner House is her first book-length work of fiction. It was named a Summer 2015 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a May 2015 Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor's Choice. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Republic and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Lauren Groff is the author of the novel The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper s, Tin House, One Story, McSweeney s, and Ploughshares; and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of the Best American Short Stories. She lives in Gainesville, Florida laurengroff.com Adam Johnson is the author of Emporium, Parasites Like Us, and The Orphan Master's Son, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Whiting Writer s Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper s, Playboy, GQ, Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, The New York Times and Best American Short Stories. He lives in San Francisco. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. T. Geronimo Johnson is the author of Hold It Til It Hurts, which was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His fiction and poetry has appeared in Best New American Voices, Indiana Review, LA Review, and Illuminations, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Johnson teaches writing at University of California Berkeley. He lives in Berkeley, California. geronimo1.com

4 Edith Pearlman s previous story collection, Binocular Vision, was a Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction, as well as for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Story Prize; it won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and was named ForeWord Book of the Year. She has published more than 250 works in national magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. edithpearlman.com Hanya Yanagihara s A Little Life was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Her previous novel, The People in the Trees, is based on the real-life story of Daniel Gajdusek, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She lives in New York City. Nell Zink s first novel, The Wallcreeper, was published in In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock zine. Her writing has also appeared in n+1. She lives near Berlin, Germany National Book Award Judges for Fiction: Daniel Alarcón is the author of numerous books, including the novel At Night We Walk in Circles, which was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the forthcoming graphic novel City of Clowns, with illustrator Sheila Alvarado. He is Executive Producer of Radio Ambulante, a Spanish language audio journalism project, and teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. danielalarcon.com Jeffery Renard Allen is Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York and an instructor in the Writing Program at The New School and New York University. Allen is the author of five books, most recently the novel Song of the Shank; the novel Rails Under My Back, which won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, and the short story collection Holding Pattern, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. jefferyrenardallen.com

5 Sarah Bagby is owner of Watermark Books & Café in Wichita, Kansas and, for many years, a book reviewer for KMUW, an NPR affiliate. In addition, she reviews for industry journals and for Watermark s newsletter. She serves on the American Booksellers Association Board of Directors and is past president of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. Laura Lippman has published more than 20 works of crime fiction 12 in the Tess Monaghan series, eight stand-alone novels, and a collection of short stories. Her work has won multiple awards and has been translated into more than 20 languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her husband David Simon and their daughter. lauralippman.com David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novella Labyrinth. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, and the Library of America's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He is the book critic and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times. Publishers submitted a total of 419 books for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. Five distinguished judges were given the charge of selecting what they deem to be the best books of the year. Their decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential. To be eligible for a 2015 National Book Award, a book must have been written by a US citizen and published in the United States between December 1, 2014 and November 30, The National Book Award Finalists will be announced on October 14 and the Winners at the invitation-only National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 18 in New York City. # # # # The National Book Foundation's mission is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America. In addition to the National Book Awards, for which it is best known, the Foundation's programs include 5 Under 35, a celebration of emerging fiction writers selected by former National Book Award Finalists and Winners; the National Book Awards Teen Press Conference, an opportunity for New York City students to interview the current National Book Award Finalists in Young People's

6 Literature; NBA on Campus, a partnership that brings National Book Award authors to colleges across the country; the Innovations in Reading Prize, awarded to individuals and institutions that have developed innovative means of creating and sustaining a lifelong love of reading; and BookUp, a writer-led, after-school reading program for middle-school students. The National Book Award is one of the nation's most prestigious literary prizes and has a stellar record of identifying and rewarding quality writing. In 1950, William Carlos Williams was the first Winner in Poetry, the following year William Faulkner was honored in Fiction, and so on through the years. Many previous Winners of a National Book Award are now firmly established in the canon of American literature, such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, James McBride, Joyce Carol Oates, and Adrienne Rich.