This week, The New Yorker will be announcing the longlists for the 2018 National Book Awards. So far, we have shared the lists in the categories of Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. Check back tomorrow for Fiction.

The authors on this year’s longlist are an accomplished group. They have, among them, four National Book Critics Circle Awards, three Pulitzer Prizes, three National Magazine Awards, and two Guggenheim fellowships. Yet they are all first-time contenders for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. One is Rebecca Solnit, who is nominated for “Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays),” a collection of writings about subjects from police violence to misogyny to climate change. But the book’s title also captures the theme of the longlist. Many of this year’s contenders take deep dives into matters of urgent public concern: voter suppression, the United States’ endless military involvement in Afghanistan, the devastation of the Syrian war, poverty in the American Midwest, and the outsized power of corporations.

The full list is below.

Carol Anderson, “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy”

Bloomsbury Publishing

Colin G. Calloway, “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation”

Oxford University Press

Steve Coll, “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan”

Penguin Press / Penguin Random House

Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple, “Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War”

One World / Penguin Random House

Victoria Johnson, “American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic”

Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company

David Quammen, “The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life”

Simon & Schuster

Sarah Smarsh, “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth”

Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Rebecca Solnit, “Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)”

Haymarket Books

Jeffrey C. Stewart, “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke”

Oxford University Press

Adam Winkler, “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights”

Liveright, W. W. Norton & Company

The judges for the category this year are Annette Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and the 2009 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History; Rachel Cass, the head buyer at Harvard Book Store; John Freeman, a writer, editor, and anthologist; Sarah Manguso, the author of several books, most recently of “300 Arguments”; and Andrés Reséndez, whose book “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America” was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award.