The 20 finalists for the 2016 National Book Awards were announced by the National Book Foundation on Thursday, October 6. Among the finalists are five titles chosen earlier this year by booksellers for the Indie Next Lists [5].

The five finalists in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature are:

FICTION

• Chris Bachelder [6], The Throwback Special (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Paulette Jiles [7], News of the World (William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers) — October 2016 Indie Next List Pick [8]
• Karan Mahajan [9], The Association of Small Bombs (Viking Books/Penguin Random House)
• Colson Whitehead [10], The Underground Railroad (Doubleday/Penguin Random House) — September 2016 Indie Next List Pick [11]
• Jacqueline Woodson [12], Another Brooklyn (Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers) — #1 August 2016 Indie Next List Pick [13]

NONFICTION

• Arlie Russell Hochschild [14], Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press)
• Ibram X. Kendi [15], Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books)
• Viet Thanh Nguyen [16], Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press)
• Andrés Reséndez [17], The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Heather Ann Thompson [18], Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House)

POETRY

• Daniel Borzutzky [19], The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press)
• Rita Dove [20], Collected Poems 1974 – 2004 (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Peter Gizzi [21], Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press)
• Jay Hopler [22], The Abridged History of Rainfall (McSweeney’s)
• Solmaz Sharif [23], Look (Graywolf Press) — July 2016 Indie Next List Pick [24]

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

• Kate DiCamillo [25], Raymie Nightingale (Candlewick Press) — #1 Summer 2016 Kids’ Indie Next List Pick [26]
• John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (Artist), [27] March: Book Three (Top Shelf Productions/IDW Publishing)
• Grace Lin [28], When the Sea Turned to Silver (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
• Jason Reynolds [29], Ghost (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing)
• Nicola Yoon [30], The Sun Is Also a Star (Delacorte Press/Penguin Random House)

The winners will be announced at an awards dinner on November 16 in New York City. A livestream of the ceremony will be available on nationalbook.org [31].

The awards ceremony will also the feature the presentation of NBF’s 2016 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community [32] to Cave Canem, a writers’ center that promotes the work of African American poets and writers through retreats, workshops, and prizes, and the 2016 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters [33] to Robert A. Caro, a lifetime achievement award for exceptional work and significant impact on American literature. Caro is the author of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf) and the multivolume biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf).