ILLUSTRATION BY BOYOUN KIM

This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the National Book Awards. Previously, we presented the contenders in the categories of Young People’s Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction.

Two of the novels on this year’s fiction longlist are débuts: “The Turner House,” by Angela Flournoy, follows a black family living in Detroit during the city's economic collapse, and “Did You Ever Have a Family,” by the literary agent and memoirist Bill Clegg, is about a peripatetic woman who has suffered a terrible personal tragedy. Three of the books are second novels: T. Geronimo Johnson’s “Welcome to Braggsville,” a comic tale about four U.C. Berkeley students who plot a protest against a Civil War reënactment in a segregated Southern town; Nell Zink’s “Mislaid,” the follow-up to her acclaimed “The Wallcreeper” (Kathryn Schulz wrote about Zink’s improbable literary fame for The New Yorker in May); and Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” which Jon Michaud described as a “big-city bildungsroman” that becomes “an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery.”

There are also three collections of short stories: “Refund,” by Karen E. Bender, which is organized around the subject of money; “Fortune Smiles,” by Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Orphan Master’s Son,” which was reviewed in the magazine in 2012; and “Honeydew,” by the “fabulist in realist’s clothing” Edith Pearlman, a book that James Wood reviewed in February. Also on the list is Jesse Ball’s new novel “A Cure for Suicide.” (You can read Wood’s review of Ball’s metafictional thriller “Silence Once Begun,” which he praised for its haunting use of silence.) Finally, “Fates and Furies” is a portrait of a marriage by Lauren Groff, who has contributed fiction to the The New Yorker since 2011.

The full list is below.

**Jesse Ball, “A Cure for Suicide”

** Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House

**Bill Clegg, “Did You Ever Have a Family”

** Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

**Karen E. Bender, “Refund”

** Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press

**Angela Flournoy, “The Turner House”

** Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

**Lauren Groff, “Fates and Furies”

** Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House

**Adam Johnson, “Fortune Smiles”

** Random House/Penguin Random House

**T. Geronimo Johnson, “Welcome to Braggsville”

** William Morrow/HarperCollins

**Edith Pearlman, “Honeydew”

** Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group

**Hanya Yanagihara, “A Little Life”

** Doubleday/Penguin Random House

**Nell Zink, “Mislaid”

** The Ecco Press/HarperCollins

The judges for this year’s Fiction category are the novelist and journalist Daniel Alarcón; the author and English professor Jeffery Renard Allen; Sarah Bagby, the owner of Watermark Books & Café, in Wichita, Kansas; Laura Lippman, the author of more than twenty works of crime fiction; and David L. Ulin, the book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

National Book Awards finalists will be announced on October 14th, and winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 18th.