By Elizabeth A. Harris in the NYT (thanks to Barbara R. and Mike C.)
[NOTE: The son of our Skyline neighbor, Debby Rutherford, is one of the five finalists for the National Book Award for fiction. His name is Ethan Rutherford and his book is titled “NorthSun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther.]
Four of the five finalists for the 2025 National Book Award in fiction, announced on Tuesday, have been previously celebrated by the organization giving the award. They include Rabih Alameddine, a fiction finalist in 2014 who is in contention this year for his novel “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother).”
Two other finalists — Karen Russell, for “The Antidote,” and Bryan Washington, for the forthcoming “Palaver” — were earlier included on the National Book Foundation’s annual lists of the five most promising novelists under 35. And Megha Majumdar, a finalist for her forthcoming novel, “A Guardian and a Thief,” saw her debut novel, “A Burning,” longlisted in 2020.
The one fiction writer new to National Book Award recognition is also the finalist published by the smallest press in the group: Ethan Rutherford, a debut novelist whose book “North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther” was put out by Deep Vellum.
The book foundation announced its 25 finalists for awards across five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. The winners will be named at a November ceremony.
Two of the shortlisted novels, by Washington and Alameddine, explore distance and connection between gay men and their mothers. Rutherford’s and Russell’s books are historical fiction, while Majumdar’s novel spends one tense week with an Indian woman trying to emigrate in the face of a climate crisis.
Several of the nonfiction finalists tackle contentious contemporary issues head-on. Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” is about the response of America and Europe to the destruction in Gaza. In “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World,” Jordan Thomas digs into a destructive six-month fire season sparked by climate change. And in “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care,” Claudia Rowe calls for reform of the foster care system.
The other finalists are Yiyun Li’s memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” about surviving the death of her two sons by suicide; and Julia Ioffe’s “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy.” That book, due out this month, is a mix of history, memoir and reporting about the author’s return to Russia nearly 20 years after her family fled the Soviet Union.
The poetry finalists are Richard Siken’s “I Do Know Some Things,” which deals with his recovery from a stroke; “Scorched Earth,” Tiana Clark’s exploration of historical pain alongside queer and Black joy; Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems”; Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “The New Economy”; and Cathy Linh Che’s “Becoming Ghost,” which considers her estranged parents’ journey as Vietnam War refugees to the United States.
The buzziest book among the translated literature nominees is “On the Calculation of Volume (Book III),” written by Solvej Balle and translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russel. It is the latest in a series of seven books that find an antiquarian book dealer reliving the same day again and again.
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Also widely reviewed is “Sad Tiger,” by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer. Part memoir and part criticism, the book looks at Sinno’s own history of sexual abuse in relation to literary works that depict incest and pedophilia by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Toni Morrison. (continued on Page 2 or here)