Brooklyn Public Library on Tuesday announced the longlists for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. Covering a range of topics reflecting Brooklyn’s diverse and creative communities, the lists include novels, fairy tales, graphic novels, poetry, memoir and nonfiction.
Librarians and staff reviewed 135 books, drawing on their expertise in literature and contemporary writing as well as their first-hand knowledge of Brooklyn’s avid reading community.
“From our home in New York City to Appalachia, and from Shanghai to Paris, the books on the 2026 Brooklyn Book Prize long list consider the strength of the human spirt, often up against impossible odds,” said Linda E. Johnson, president and chief executive officer of Brooklyn Public Library. “The extraordinary talent represented here showcases the beauty and meaning we can discover when writers are free to express themselves.”
In the fiction category, a novelist introduces us to a New Yorker just evicted from her apartment. In another, we meet a man living in Appalachia who is faced with an impossible choice. In a debut novel, a woman with a ho-hum weekday job reveals a secret and sometimes turbulent weekend life.
In the nonfiction category—which encompasses biography, poetry, and narrative nonfiction— a memoirist traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City and back. A philosopher pays tribute to the Black women who combined their ancestral spiritual beliefs from West Africa with local herbal rituals and remedies many of which we still use today. A writer explores how the subprime mortgage scandal and white collar crimes—committed in corner offices—dramatically changed East New York.
The BPL 2026 Book Prize Longlists
(Alphabetical by author’s last name)
Fiction
Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno (Scribner)
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk (Random House)
Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen (Knopf)
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press)
Sleep by Honor Jones (Riverhead Books)
Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C. P. Cavafy by Robin Coste Lewis (Knopf)
Drome by Jesse Lonergan (23rd Street Books)
Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown and Company)
You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White (Saga Press)
Nonfiction
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield (W.W. Norton & Company)
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza (Catapult)
Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd (Haymarket Books)
Jailbreak of Sparrows by Martín Espada (Knopf)
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone (Crown)
The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood by Stacy Horn (Gillian Flynn Books)
Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear into Pride, Power, and Real Change by Cristina Jiménez (St. Martin’s Griffin)
Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau)
The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic by Lindsey Stewart (Legacy Lit)
