This week, The New Yorker has been announcing the longlists for the 2016 National Book Awards. Previously, we presented the ten contenders in the categories of Young People’s Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction. Today, we present the last list: Fiction.

Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad” boldly reimagines a historical moment: What if, the book asks, the titular pathway to freedom for American slaves was an actual railroad that was literally underground? “It is a clever choice,” Kathryn Schulz wrote last month in The New Yorker, “reminding us that a metaphor never got anyone to freedom.”

“The Underground Railroad” is the first of Whitehead’s books to be longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. He’s joined by two previous contenders, Adam Haslett and Brad Watson—and also by a writer who, in 2014, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature: Jacqueline Woodson. The other six writers here, like Whitehead, have not been longlisted before. Many of them have written for The New Yorker or had their work reviewed by the magazine, and you’ll find links to those stories and reviews in the full list, below.

Chris Bachelder, “The Throwback Special”

W. W. Norton & Company

Garth Greenwell, “What Belongs to You”

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Adam Haslett, “Imagine Me Gone”

Little, Brown & Company

Paulette Jiles, “News of the World”

William Morrow

Karan Mahajan, “The Association of Small Bombs”

Viking Books

Elizabeth McKenzie, “The Portable Veblen”

Penguin Press

Lydia Millet, “Sweet Lamb of Heaven”

W. W. Norton & Company

Brad Watson, “Miss Jane”

W. W. Norton & Company

Colson Whitehead, “The Underground Railroad”

Doubleday

Jacqueline Woodson, “Another Brooklyn”

Amistad

The judges in this year’s Fiction category are James English, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Karen Joy Fowler, whose most recent novel, “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award; T. Geronimo Johnson, whose second novel, “Welcome to Braggsville,” was longlisted for the National Book Award, in 2015; Julie Otsuka, whose novel “The Buddha in the Attic” was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Jesmyn Ward, whose novel “Salvage the Bones” won the National Book Award, in 2011.

National Book Awards finalists will be announced on October 13th, and winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 16th.