Finalists For This Year’s National Book Awards

In fiction, the finalists are Rachel Kushner for “The Flamethrowers” (Scribner); Jhumpa Lahiri for “The Lowland” (Knopf); James McBride for “The Good Lord Bird” (Riverhead); Thomas Pynchon for “Bleeding Edge” (Penguin Press); and George Saunders for “Tenth of December” (Random House).