The National Book Foundation has revealed the longlists for the 2025 National Book Awards in the categories of Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction.

Each longlist honors 10 titles published in the totally intuitive and not at all bewildering eligibility window of December 1, 2024 through November 30, 2025.

Among the highlights:

• Truth Is by Hannah V. Sawyer, a novel in verse about a 17-year-old girl getting an abortion in post-Roe America, is recognized for Young People’s Literature.
• Nobel Prize winner Han Kang notches her first NBA nod for We Do Not Part
• Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This continues its year-long run of acclaim with a Nonfiction nomination.
• We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, is the first novel written in Uzbek to be nominated.
• Nine of the 10 poetry nominees are making their first appearances on an NBA longlist.

The longlist for Fiction will be revealed Friday. Finalists in all five categories will be announced October 7, and the awards will be given November 19.

See all of the nominated titles.

✋ The judge in Bartz v. Anthropic , the class action lawsuit filed by authors who claimed the AI company had violated copyright by using their books to train its large language models, has delayed approval of the proposed $1.5 billion settlement announced last week.

Showing a little side-eye about how the whole resolution process has gone down, Judge William Alsup also said he was "disappointed" that the plaintiffs’ attorneys had left important questions unanswered and expressed concern that claimants may "get the shaft."

The next hearing is September 25.

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🚀 2025 is a good year for lesbians in space. First, the GMA Book Club selected Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere in June, and now Reese’s Book Club is highlighting To the Moon and Back, Eliana Ramage’s debut novel about a Cherokee woman on a mission to become an astronaut.

Elsewhere in Book Club Land:

• Jenna Bush Hager tapped Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, calling it a " once-in-a-decade novel."
• Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club is going for double the fun with Moderation by Elaine Castillo and Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas.
• GMA will read The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso.
• Oprah, who was integral to the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon, has picked Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, All the Way to the River.

Dig into more notable book club selections.

This is not a place you go looking for something specific. This is not a place you go for a few minutes. Baldwin’s Book Barn is a place you go when you want to get lost. Five floors. More than 300,000 books. All in a two-century-old converted dairy farm. 

In 1946, William and Lilla Baldwin moved their used book and collectible business from downtown Wilmington, DE to the store’s current building in the Brandywine Valley. Ever since, it has been a destination for book lovers in the Northeast (I made a pilgrimage there with my family about 10 years ago) and beyond. 

Tom Baldwin took over the business from his parents and said one thing his father believed contributed to the store’s longevity was that the area was a great place to acquire used books. As a generalist store, Baldwin’s takes all kinds of books, and indeed itself is a place other dealers come to fill their more specialized collections. 

The rooms ramble. The stairs creak. And, as the staff would have you believe, three ghosts haunt the place in an amiable way that doesn’t scare anybody . There are chairs scattered throughout, with customers encouraged to stay and read as long as they like. It gets drafty in the winter (there’s only a single potbelly stove to heat the place), and you’ll need a map to figure out where you want to poke around. And you’ll have to duck (or bump, as the sign says) through cramped old doorways and squint at underlit shelves. But you won’t want to leave. And you’ll look forward to coming back. And even if you don’t, as I have not, you’ll be glad to know places like this are still around. -JO

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A few years ago, as The Atlantic was reimagining how they wanted to write about books, they had an idea. What about merging travel writing and literary coverage? “The Atlantic has a long tradition of literary work,” says Boris Kachka, Book Editor at The Atlantic. “Our conference rooms are all named after writers.” Their new series, The Writer’s Way, sends writers out across the world to write about places through the lens of a specific literary moment, event, or connection.  

So far, the series has seen Caity Weaver write on Twain in Paris, Honor Jones on John le Carré in Corfu, and the most recent installment has Lauren Groff writing on Lady Murasaki and The Tale of Genji from Tokyo.

“It’s a pretty plum assignment,” Kachka says, but also a serious commitment. “It’s a kind of triangle. You want to get the right writer. On the right subject book or author. In the right place. And you can start at any three of those points.”

As The Atlantic , and the rest of the text-based internet, moves away from chasing search traffic, a kind of return to deeper, more valuable writing has shown that readers care about quality: “When you bring together the literature and the travel, all of a sudden you have something that feels synthetic and new and there’s a reason for it to exist. That’s what we’re trying to do: find a way to create quality work that grabs people’s attention.”

You can find all three published installments of The Writer’s Way here. Kachka says he expects to publish more in the series in the future. 

Photographs by Alice Zoo and Takako Kido for The Atlantic

If you’re making an early-20th-century period piece about two men who fall in love while recording rural folk singers in the Northeast, and you want to fill theater seats, you cast Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.

The History of Sound premiered at the Cannes festival this spring and hits theaters tomorrow. Directed by Oliver Hermanus, it is adapted from the title story of Ben Shattuck’s 2024 collection by the same name. Watch the trailer here.

Here are more page-to-screen adaptations coming this month.

Style that moves with you and the planet. From the trail to the train to your favorite reading chair, Prana’s sustainably made cardigans are ready for the next chapter. Free shipping on all orders.

Happy Birthday to James McBride, who is on a three-novel run for the ages. The Good Lord Bird won the 2013 National Book Award and was made into a series starring Ethan Hawke. Deacon King Kong was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2020. And The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year for 2023 and a Readers’ Pick for The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century So Far. Whew.

I had the chance to talk to McBride about his life as a reader , and especially about how books and reading were part of his childhood.

On having books in the house:

”My house was full of books. We read tons of books when I was a kid. We weren’t allowed to watch television. It was either books or music. And for me, it was both. Because we had a piano and we had plenty of books. And that was your only private space–when you sat down at the piano and hammered away at something, or you pulled a book up and just piled yourself into a corner beneath the pile of clothes and started reading.”

On books as a safe space:

“ I had to go to school and I had to go to church. When I came home, I couldn’t go out to play that much. When the sun came down, I had to come in the house and there were always books around and I just loved, I loved disappearing into that world. I just slipped into a closet to read.”

On books getting you out of trouble…mostly:

“My mother and my stepfather were both big proponents of reading. If you were reading a book, your chances of getting into trouble or spanked would lessen greatly (unless you just totally transgressed).

I remember one time I did something wrong and one of my brothers had a book called Great Men of Medicine. My mother marched into the living room. She was mad about something and I cracked that book open, man. I, I probably was reading it upside down, but she saw the cover, her anger dropped down a couple of notches. Great medicine.” – JO

☕️ Keep your coffee warm whether you’re traveling across town or just to the couch.**

🗳️ Read an excerpt from Kamala Harris’s forthcoming memoir about the 2024 campaign, 107 Days.

📱 Spotify has launched a BookTok hub for US listeners.

😱 12th-graders’ reading skills have hit a new low.

🗓️ The Brooklyn Book Festival starts Saturday and runs through September 22 with an incredible line-up of authors and events.

_{**This is a product recommendation from the Book Riot team. When you buy through these links, we may earn a commission.}

Written by Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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