National Book award nonfiction shortlist announced

2015 has already seen its share of remarkable nonfiction, and that diversity is reflected in the shortlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, released today. The list includes Ta-Nehisi Coates’ open letter to his son about growing up black in America, Cynthia Barnett’s cultural history of rain, and Sally Mann’s memoir in photographs, among many others.

The fiction shortlist will be announced Thursday. After that, finalists will be announced on Oct. 14, and winners will be announced in a ceremony on Nov. 18. See the full nonfiction shortlist below.

Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (Crown/Penguin Random House)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel and Grau/Penguin Random House)

Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (Yale University Press)

Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group)

Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness (Atria/Simon and Schuster)

Susanna Moore, Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai’i (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan)

Michael Paterniti, Love and Other Ways of Dying (The Dial Press/Penguin Random House)

Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran (Henry Holt and Company/Macmillan)

Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light: A Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf)

Michael White, Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir (Persea Books)

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