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 and Poetry. Today, Nonfiction. Check back tomorrow for the final category: Fiction. _

Half of the titles on this year’s National Book Awards longlist for Nonfiction can be classified as memoirs. But within that flexible category is immense variety: there’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s open letter to his son, about how to “live free in this black body”; Sally Mann’s photo-filled account of her familial and artistic life in the American South; Carla Power’s story of friendship with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi and their joint study of the Koran; Tracy K. Smith’s chronicle of “growing up in a bookish family and the dawning of her poetic vocation”; and Michael White’s record of travelling through Europe and the U.S. to see the paintings of Vermeer while going through a painful divorce.

The diversity of the category’s non-memoirs is equally striking, from Cynthia Barnett’s study of rain—which stretches from the Earth’s beginnings to contemporary India—to Martha Hodes’s deep dive into the death of Lincoln; from Sy Montgomery’s investigation into the emotional lives of octopi to Susanna Moore’s history of the state she grew up in, Hawaii. Finally, Michael Paterniti’s essays range from the tale of a giant in rural Ukraine to a cross-country drive with Albert Einstein’s brain.

The full list of titles is below.

**Cynthia Barnett, “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History”

** Crown/Penguin Random House

**Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me”

** Spiegel and Grau/Penguin Random House

**Martha Hodes, “Mourning Lincoln”

** Yale University Press

**Sally Mann, “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs”

** Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group

**Sy Montgomery, “The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness”

** Atria/Simon and Schuster

**Susanna Moore, “Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i”

** Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan

**Michael Paterniti, “Love and Other Ways of Dying”

** The Dial Press/Penguin Random House

**Carla Power, “If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran”

** Henry Holt and Company/Macmillan

**Tracy K. Smith, “Ordinary Light: A Memoir”

** Alfred A. Knopf

**Michael White, “Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir”

** Persea Books

The judges for this year’s Nonfiction category are Diane Ackerman, whose many books include “The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us,” the winner of the 2015 PEN Henry David Thoreau Prize for nature writing; Patricia Hill Collins, a professor of sociology and the author of “Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism,” among other books; John D’Agata, who teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa and whose books include “The Next American Essay”; Paul Holdengräber, the founder and director of LIVE from the New York Public Library; and Adrienne Mayor, a scholar in classics and history and the author of “The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates,” a National Book Award finalist in 2009.

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