July 2, 2015

2015 Center for Fiction long list announced

by

Screen Shot 2015-06-30 at 11.17.13 PMEarlier this week, the Center for Fiction announced its long list for the Fiction First Novel Prize, which will be awarded to the best debut novel published between January 1 and December 31, 2015. The first place prize-winner will receive $10,000, and each of the shortlisted authors will receive $1,000. The short list will be announced later this year, in September, and the complete long list is available below. Notable first-place winners from previous years include Junot Díaz, Hannah Tinti, and Ben Fountain, among many others.

Whether or not you heard it here first, you heard it here: Alexandra Kleeman’s strange and surreal and utterly mesmerizing novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine could not be more deserving of inclusion on this list. We’re over-the-moon thrilled to be publishing it in the U.K. and Harper will be publishing it here in the States later this summer.

After the Parade by Lori Ostlund (Scribner)

Against the Country by Ben Metcalf (Random House)

The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips (Henry Holt & Co.)

Black River by S.M. Hulse (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam (Penguin Books)

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (Knopf)

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The First Bad Man by Miranda July (Scribner)

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (Little, Brown)

Girl at War by Sara Nović (Random House)

The Girl from the Garden by Parnaz Forouton (Ecco)

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead Books)

The Heart of the Order by Theo Schell-Lambert (Little A)

 The Hopeful by Tracy O’Neill (Ig Publishing)

I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them by Jesse Goolsby  (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Landfalls by Naomi J. Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Language of Paradise by Barbara Klein Moss (W.W. Norton)

Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet (St. Martin’s Press)

Orhan’s Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian (Algonquin Books)

She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan Barry (Pantheon Books)

The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson (Penguin Press)

The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein (Bloomsbury)

The Sweetheart by Angelina Mirabella (Simon & Schuster)

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press)

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Unfortunates by Sophie McManus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman (Harper)

Taylor Sperry is an editor at Melville House.

MobyLives