2024 National Book Award longlist

I can’t make heads or tails of it, the goat on the corner of Union and Metropolitan.

While they experience their final moments, their life flashes across time and geography, leaping from memories of childhood to the inherited memory and historical movements of their family: smoking Winstons aged twelve, after Hebrew School; their mother disappearing without a trace; a college reunion filled with ghosts.

Visceral, propulsive and at turns fluorescently beautiful and tragic, Yr Dead is a diasporic bildungsroman that explores the things that make us human and alive with clear-eyed sincerity.