National Book Awards Longlist 2024

Martyr!

A novel

By: Kaveh Akbar
Narrated by: Arian Moayed
Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

“Kaveh Akbar is a major new voice in American literature and Martyr! is his tour de force. In a mix of penetrating insight and profoundly funny stories, this entertaining and moving tale holds a mirror up to our society. Read more

Catalina

A Novel

By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Length: 6 hours 9 minutes

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

“[A]... Read more

James

A Novel

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
Length: 7 hours 48 minutes

“This will be in my top five books of 2024! Percival Everett is a truly gifted storyteller! James is full of unexpected twists, tense moments, and tender times. Narrator Dominic Hoffman is incredible... the perfect person and voice for this cast of characters. I can't wait to hand sell this book! Read more

All Fours

A Novel

By: Miranda July
Narrated by: Miranda July
Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

“So good! An unnamed woman, who is a somewhat famous artist, struggles with middle-age. Facing a career crisis, depression, and peri-menopause, she decides to drive to an event in New York from LA to prove she is not the person she or others expect. Instead of reaching NY, she winds up staying in a motel room 20 minutes from her house for 3... Read more

Creation Lake

A Novel

By: Rachel Kushner
Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

“Rachel Kushner further extends her hot streak with this twisty and darkly humorous philosophical thriller. Our protagonist gives us the name 'Sadie Smith' but one has to take everything she shares with a grain of salt, given the fact that she is a morally flexible spy tasked with infiltrating an activist commune in the south of France. The story... Read more

There's Always This Year

On Basketball and Ascension

By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

“You need not be a basketball aficionado to have your heart profoundly captured by this incredible work of nonfiction. Part cultural commentary and part memoir, Abdurraqib's writing is poetic and distinct, making you feel like you are watching a cherished friend perform spoken word. Structured like the four quarters of a basketball game,... Read more

Magical/Realism

Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders

By: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Narrated by: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Length: 12 hours 24 minutes

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.

Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her... Read more

Whiskey Tender

A Memoir

By: Deborah Taffa
Narrated by: Charley Flyte
Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

Longlisted for the National Book AwardAn Oprah Daily ""Best New Book"" and ""Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read"" * A New York Times ""New Book to Read"" * A The New Yorker ""Best Book out now"" * An Esquire ""Best Book (so far)"" * A Zibby Mag ""Most Anticipated Book"" * An Elle ""Best Book"" * A Washington Post ""Book to Read this... Read more

A Great Disorder

National Myth and the Battle for America

By: Richard Slotkin
Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
Length: 20 hours 53 minutes

Red America and Blue America are divided with wildly diverging views of why government exists and who counts as American. Their ideologies are grounded in different versions of American history, endorsing irreconcilable visions of patriotism and national identity.



A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today's culture... Read more

The War Below

Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

By: Ernest Scheyder
Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
Length: 12 hours 8 minutes

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION AND THE 2024 FINANCIAL TIMES AND SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

This unprecedented look inside the global battle to power our lives is “required reading for anyone interested in the 360-degree impacts of the energy transition” (Daniel Poneman, former US Deputy Secretary of Energy)... Read more

Knife

Meditations After an Attempted Murder

By: Salman Rushdie
Narrated by: Salman Rushdie
Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

“Markedly human and open. Rushdie reads us vulnerably into his experience and ponders about our broken and somehow beautiful world. Read more

Unshrinking

How to Face Fatphobia

By: Kate Manne
Narrated by: Kate Manne
Length: 6 hours 38 minutes

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it—from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled

“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our... Read more

Circle of Hope

A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

By: Eliza Griswold
Narrated by: Jennifer Pickens
Length: 11 hours 57 minutes

A Pulitzer Prize winner’s intimate portrait of a church, its radical mission, and its riveting crisis.

"Jennifer Pickens adopts an even-keeled reportorial cadence and timbre well suited to Griswold's immersion journalism, which recounts the rise and fall of Circle of Hope."—AudioFile

“The revolution I wanted to be part of was in the church.”... Read more

Soldiers and Kings

Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling

By: Jason De León
Narrated by: Jason De León
Length: 9 hours 57 minutes

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

“A work of extraordinary reportage and compassion...[it] will shock you, move you, and leave you changed.”
—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted and Poverty, by America

“An enlightening, frightening, unforgettable read.”
—Sandra Cisneros, bestselling author of... Read more

Our Moon

How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

By: Rebecca Boyle
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
Length: 12 hours 1 minute

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A riveting feat of science writing that recasts that most familiar of celestial objects into something eerily extraordinary, pivotal to our history, and awesome in the original sense of the word.”—Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World

A New York Times Book... Read more

Rejection

Fiction

By: Tony Tulathimutte
Narrated by: Micky Shiloah, Allyson Ryan, Quincy Surasmith, Dan Bittner, André Santana, Marcha Kia, Eunice Wong & Madeleine Maby
Length: 8 hours 1 minute

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION""A master comedian with a virtuoso prose style has produced an audacious, original and highly disturbing book . . . an incandescent satire."" —Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine From the Whiting and O. Henry–winning author of Private Citizens (“the first great millennial novel,” New... Read more

The Most

By: Jessica Anthony
Narrated by: Abigail Reno
Length: 3 hours 37 minutes

“A hauntingly beautiful story about marriage, first love, and unfulfilled dreams. Kathleen is a 1950s housewife who one day feels unwell and decides to stay home from church. Her husband Virgil returns home later to find her in their pool and refuses to get out. The Most takes place over a day, switching between the past and present to show... Read more

Modern Poetry

Poems

By: Diane Seuss
Narrated by: Diane Seuss
Length: 2 hours 38 minutes

Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but... Read more

Spectral Evidence

Poems

By: Gregory Pardlo
Narrated by: Gregory Pardlo
Length: 2 hours 23 minutes

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY • A powerful meditation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law, from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic

Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves... Read more

Pink Slime

A Novel

By: Fernanda Trías
Narrated by: Frankie Corzo
Length: 6 hours 24 minutes

Longlisted for the 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature • “Evocative, dreamlike, and immersive…The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you.” —Esquire

A harrowing, intimate novel about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them teeters on the edge—marking an award-winning... Read more