Call your bookies and update your literary-award-season betting slips: The National Book Foundation’s Fiction Longlist has arrived . This year’s roster features two debuts — down one from last year and a far cry from 2022’s eight — and one author, the great Joy Williams, whose previous nomination occurred more than 50 years ago, for 1974’s State of Grace . (Check out that incredible Vintage Contemporaries cover .) Williams’s The Pelican Child , which comes out in November, is a collection of short stories taking place in “an indifferent and caustic world.”

Likely less caustic is Bryan Washington’s Palaver , his third novel, about a gay man living in Japan whose mother appears in his life after a period of estrangement. The Antidote , by Karen Russell, follows a cast of five ch

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