This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2019 National Book Awards. This morning, we present the ten contenders in the category of Fiction. Earlier this week, we published longlists for Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.

In January, Jia Tolentino profiled the writer Marlon James, whose most recent book, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” is a sprawling fantasy epic billed as the African “Game of Thrones.” Part of James’s project was to imbue genre forms with the cachet of literature. As Tolentino wrote, “Even as condescension toward genre fiction has gone out of style, the universes of literary and speculative fiction remain distinct, with their own awards, their own publishers, and their own separate, albeit overlapping, communities of readers.”

Those universes may slowly be merging. “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” is one of ten contenders for the National Book Award in Fiction, as is Helen Phillips’s “The Need,” a forensic study of marriage and parenthood that presents as a thriller. Only one nominee—Colson Whitehead—has been honored by the National Book Awards before, and half of the books are débuts: novels by Ocean Vuong, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Julia Phillips, and short-story collections by Kali Fajardo-Anstine and Kimberly King Parsons.

The full list is below.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Fleishman Is in Trouble”

Random House / Penguin Random House

Susan Choi, “Trust Exercise”

Henry Holt & Company / Macmillan Publishers

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, “Sabrina & Corina: Stories”

One World / Penguin Random House

Marlon James, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf”

Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House

Laila Lalami, “The Other Americans”

Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House

Kimberly King Parsons, “Black Light: Stories”

Vintage / Penguin Random House

Helen Phillips, “The Need”

Simon & Schuster

Julia Phillips, “Disappearing Earth”

Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random House

Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

Penguin Press / Penguin Random House

Colson Whitehead, “The Nickel Boys”

Doubleday / Penguin Random House

This year’s judges for the category were Dorothy Allison, the author of “Bastard out of Carolina,” a National Book Award finalist; Ruth Dickey, the executive director of Seattle Arts & Lectures; Javier Ramirez, a longtime Chicago indie-book seller and the co-owner of Madison Street Books; Danzy Senna, a recipient of the Whiting Award and the author, most recently, of “New People,” a New York Times Notable Book; and Jeff VanderMeer, the best-selling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy, whose work has been translated into thirty-eight languages.