The National Book Awards’ 2015 longlist includes several fierce contenders in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature.

In fiction: Jesse Ball’s A Cure for Suicide (Pantheon Books); Karen E. Bender’s Refund: Stories (Counterpoint Press); Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family (Scout Press/Simon & Schuster); Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House); Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles: Stories (Random House); T. Geronimo Johnson’s Welcome to Braggsville (William Morrow/HarperCollins); Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew (Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group); Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Doubleday/Penguin Random House); and Nell Zink’s Mislaid (Ecco/HarperCollins).

In nonfiction: Cynthia Barnett’s Rain (Crown Publishing/Penguin Random House); Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau/Penguin Random House); Martha Hodes’ Mourning Lincoln (Yale University Press); Sally Mann’s Hold Still (Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group); Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus (Atria/Simon & Schuster); Susanna Moore’s Paradise of the Pacific (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Michael Paterniti’s Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays (The Dial Press/Penguin Random House); Carla Power’s If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and Journey to the Heart of the Quran (Henry Holt and Company); Tracy K. Smith’s Ordinary Light (Alfred A. Knopf); and Michael White’s Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir (Persea Books).

In poetry: Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press); Amy Gerstler’s Scattered at Sea (Penguin/Penguin Random House); Marilyn Hacker’s A Stranger’s Mirror (W.W. Norton & Company): Terrance Hayes’ How to Be Drawn (Penguin/Penguin Random House); Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty (Alfred A. Knopf); Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf); Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions); Patrick Phillips’ Elegy for a Broken Machine (Alfred A. Knopf); Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); and Lawrence Raab’s Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo Press).

In young people’s literature: Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins Children’s Books); M.T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad (Candlewick Press); Ali Benjamin’s The Thing About Jellyfish (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); Rae Carson’s Walk on Earth a Stranger (Greenwillow/HarperCollins Children’s Books); Gary Paulsen’s This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs (Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing); Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins Children’s Books); Ilyasah Shabazz, with Kekla Magoon’s, X: A Novel (Candlewick Press); Steve Sheinkin’s Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War (Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group); Neal Shusterman’s Challenger Deep (HarperCollins Children’s Books); and Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona (HarperTeen/HarperCollins Children’s Books).

The shortlist for the awards will be announced on Oct. 17, and the winners at a gala in New York on Nov. 18, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Carolyn Kellogg

Flavorwire contributor Jonathon Sturgeon has weighed in with his opinion of the contenders.