National Book Award Finalists Are Out

Salman Rushdie's memoir about his near-fatal stabbing, Knife, and Percival Everett's revisionist historical novel, James, are among the finalists for the 75th annual National Book Awards. Others nominated include author-filmmaker Miranda July for her explicit novel on middle age, All Fours, and the celebrated Canadian poet Anne Carson for Wrong Norma. On Tuesday, the National Book Foundation announced finalists in fiction, nonfiction, young people's literature, poetry, and books in translation. Winners will be announced during a Nov. 20 dinner ceremony in Manhattan, when honorary prizes will be presented to novelist Barbara Kingsolver and publisher-activist W. Paul Coates. More, per the AP:

• In fiction: Nominees besides James and All Fours are Pemi Aguda's debut story collection, Ghostroots; Kaveh Akbar's debut novel, Martyr!; and My Friends, a novel by Hisham Matar, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Return. Everett's novel, which retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved man Mark Twain had named Jim, is also a Booker Prize finalist and among the year's most acclaimed works.
• In nonfiction: Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder; Jason De Leon's Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling; Eliza Griswold's Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church; Kate Manne's Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia; and Deborah Jackson Taffa's Whiskey Tender.
• In poetry: Carson's Wrong Norma; Fady Joudah's (...); m.s. RedCherries' debut collection mother; Diane Seuss' Modern Poetry; and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Something About Living.
• In young people's literature: Violet Duncan's Buffalo Dreamer; Josh Galarza's The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky; Erin Entrada Kelly's The First State of Being; Shifa Saltagi Safadi's Kareem Between; and Angela Shante's The Unboxing of a Black Girl.

• In translated works: Bothayna Al-Essa's The Book Censor's Library; Samar Yazbek's Where the Wind Calls Home; Linnea Axelsson's Aednan; Fiston Mwanza Mujila's The Villain's Dance; and Yang Shuang-zi's Taiwan Travelogue.
• Of note: Knife is the first National Book Award nomination for the 77-year-old Rushdie, who was living overseas and ineligible at the time he published the Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children and other works. The prolific Everett, author of more than 20 books and the recipient of several awards, is also a first-time nominee.

(More National Book Awards stories.)