If They Gave Oscars to Books, Our 2017 Nominees

Welcome to Literary Hub’s second annual Academy Awards for Books. Of course, the Real Book Oscars are given out at the National Book Awards ceremony; so consider these the Fake Book Oscars—they’re extra fun because you don’t even have to dress up. In putting this list together, we figured out what each of the Academy Awards categories would look like if applied to the literary world—so Best Picture = Best Novel, etc.—and then we nominated a bunch of books and people for each.

The only question is: what should the statues look like? Little golden Maya Angelous? Globular Hemingways? Teetering book towers? Our nominations for the imaginary 2018 Academy Awards for Books are below—and since, just like the real Academy Awards, all these categories are based on taste and leave off a lot of fine contenders, feel free to nominate any and all of your missing favorites in the comments.

Best Novel (Best Picture)

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (Random House)
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead)
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee (Grand Central)
Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls (New Directions)
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)
The Idiot, Elif Batuman (Penguin Press)
Autumn, Ali Smith (Anchor)

*

Male Literary Citizen (Actor in a Leading Role)

LeVar Burton, Host of LeVar Burton Reads
Brian Gresko, Co-Host of Pete’s Reading Series
Kevin Young, Poetry Editor of The New Yorker
Tom Beer, Books Editor of Newsday
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Author, Professor, Critic, and 2017 MacArthur Fellow
Chris Jackson, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of One World
Kaveh Akbar, Poet

*

Female Literary Citizen (Actress in a Leading Role)

Glory Edim, Founder of Well-Read Black Girl
Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation
Emma Straub, Owner of Books Are Magic
Liz Phipps Soeiro, Librarian who refused Melania Trump’s donation
Rebecca Solnit, General Voice of Reason
Nicole Cliffe, Writer who led the charge against Harper’s
Celeste Ng, Our Moral Leader
Nicole Chung, Catapult Web Editor-in-Chief

*

Debut by a Male Author (Actor in a Supporting Role)

In the Distance, Hernan Diaz (Coffee House)
Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan (Restless Books)
American War, Omar El Akkad (Vintage)
Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash (Coffee House)
My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent (Riverhead)

*

Debut by a Female Author (Actress in a Supporting Role)

Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf)
Marlena, Julie Buntin (Henry Holt)
What We Lose, Zinzi Clemmons (Viking)
Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang (Lenny)
A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (Counterpoint)
Chemistry, Weike Wang (Knopf)

*

Best YA Novel (Animated Feature Film)

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas (Balzer + Bray)
Far From the Tree, Robin Benway (HarperTeen)
When Dimple Met Rishi, Sandhya Menon (Simon Pulse)
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, Mackenzi Lee (Katherine Tegen)
Starfish, Akemi Dawn Bowman (Simon Pulse)
American Street, Ibi Zoboi (Balzer + Bray)
Long Way Down, Jason Reynolds (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy)
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Erika Sánchez (Knopf Young Readers)
Goodbye Days, Jeff Zentner (Crown Young Readers)

*

Best Setting (Cinematography)

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (Random House)
A Separation, Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)
The Lost City of the Monkey God, Douglas Preston (Grand Central)
History of Wolves, Emily Fridlund (Grove)
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, Jack E. Davis (Liveright)

*

Best Book Jacket Design (Costume Design)

Oliver Munday, The Idiot, Elif Batuman (Penguin Press)
Rodrigo Corral, The Answers, Catherine Lacey (FSG)
Peter Mendelsund, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition, Fernando Pessoa (New Directions)
Matt Dorfman, Hollow, Owen Egerton (Soft Skull)
Patti Ratchford, Abandon Me, Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)
Paul Sahre, The World Goes On, László Krasnzahorkai (New Directions)
Na Kim, Isadora, Amelia Gray (FSG)

*

Best Work of Nonfiction (Documentary—Feature)

Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann (Doubleday)
Ghosts of the Tsunami, Richard Lloyd Parry (MCD)
Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)
The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Random House)
We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World)
Bunk, Kevin Young (Graywolf)
The Future is History, Masha Gessen (Riverhead)
A Moonless, Starless Sky, Alexis Okeowo (Hachette)

*

Best Essay Collection (Documentary—Short Subject)

Somebody With a Little Hammer, Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon)
Draft No. 4, John McPhee (FSG)
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib (Two Dollar Radio)
Sunshine State, Sarah Gerrard (Harper Perennial)
South and West, Joan Didion (Vintage)
Abandon Me, Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (NYRB)

*

Best Work of Experimental Literature (Film Editing)

Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell (Riverhead)
Person/a, Elizabeth Ellen (Short Flight/Long Drive)
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (Random House)
theMystery.doc, Matthew McIntosh (Grove)
Shadowbahn, Steve Erickson (Blue Rider)

*

Best Book in Translation (Foreign Language Film)

Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)
Such Small Hands, Andrés Barba, tr. Lisa Dillman (Transit Books)
The White City, Karolina Ramqvist, tr. Saskia Vogel (Grove)
Frontier, Can Xue, tr. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Open Letter)
Black Moses, Alain Mabanckou, tr. Helen Stevenson (New Press)
The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition, Fernando Pessoa, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (New Directions)

*

Coolest Publicity Squad (Production Design)

Jack Jones Literary Arts
Lauren Cerand
Broadside PR
Kathy Daneman
Alyson Sinclair

*

Best Picture Book (Short Film—Animated)

Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, Derrick Barnes, illus. Gordon C. James (Agate Bolden)
Walk With Me, Jairo Buitrago, illus. Rafael Yockteng, tr. Elisa Amado (Groundwood Books)
Triangle, Mac Barnett, illus. Jon Klassen (Walker Books)
A Different Pond, Bao Phi, illus. Thi Bui (Capstone Young Readers)

*

Best Book of Short Stories (Short Film—Live Action)

The Dark Dark: Stories, Samantha Hunt (FSG Originals)
I Am the Brother of XX, Fleur Jaeggy, tr. Gini Alhadeff (New Directions)
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Books)
The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove)
The Mountain, Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)
Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah (Riverhead)
The Complete Short Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy)

*

Best Comic/Graphic Novel (Visual Effects)

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics)
Monograph, Chris Ware (Rizzoli)
One More Year, Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics)
Boundless, Jillian Tamaki (Drawn and Quarterly)
The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui (Abrams ComicArts)

*

Best Work of Fantasy/SF/Speculative Fiction (Makeup and Hairstyling)

The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
The Changeling, Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)
The Power, Naomi Alderman (Little, Brown)
Houses of Ravicka, Renee Gladman (Dorothy)
Borne, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD)
The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager)

*

Best Book of Poetry (Sound Editing & Sound Mixing)

Electric Arches, Eve L. Ewing (Haymarket Books)
I Know Your Kind, William Brewer (Milkweed Editions)
Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith (Graywolf)
Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, Charif Shanahan (Southern Illinois University Press)
Whereas, Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf)
Nature Poem, Tommy Pico (Tin House Books)
Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar (Alice James Books)
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, Morgan Parker (Tin House Books)