It’s a good year to be a newcomer, at least if you dream of a National Book Award. Eight of the 10 nominees on the annual prizes’ fiction longlist, announced Friday by the National Book Foundation, are debut fiction authors. Their narratives include the making of an artist from a struggling Florida immigrant family, an epic of ecstatic visions revolving around a failed Midwestern industrial town, a queer Latino professor’s conflicted return to suburban Long Island and women trying to make do in male-dominated Alaska.
Among the nominated debuts are “If I Survive You” by Jonathan Escoffery, “Maria, Maria & Other Stories” by Marytza K. Rubio, “The Town of Babylon” by Alejandro Varela and “The Rabbit Hutch” by Tess Gunty. Jamil Jan Kochai drew a nod for his second book, the story collection “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” and Gayle Jones, who was a fiction finalist in 1998, was longlisted for her new novel, “The Birdcatcher.”
Forty other authors were listed earlier this week in the categories of poetry, nonfiction, translated literature and young people’s literature.
