📚 And the finalists are…

Just last month, the National Book Award judges announced their longlists. Today, they’ve shared their shortlists (Translated Work, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature), headlined by the Fiction finalists, for which we have rounded up what some critics and authors are saying about them. Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi “Assadi (The Stars Are Not Yet Bells) spins a beautiful and heartbreaking novel out of a Palestinian man’s deathbed reflections.” —Publishers Weekly ““Paradiso 17,” her third work of fiction, is quiet and alert; it is a study in inheritance, in the afterlife of ideology, in the way history seeps into every curated idyll.” —The New York Times Dèy by Edwidge Danticat “A Haitian American woman reckons with the cost of hiding her pain in this illuminating novel from Danticat, winner of the NBCC award for Everything Inside.”—Publishers Weekly “Dèy” is a love song and an elegy for the Haitian diaspora.” —The New York Times Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera “Delgado Lopera (Fiebre Tropical) dives into Colombia’s taboo queer culture in this scintillating narrative of a man torn between belonging and self-expression.” —Publishers W...