The 2024
Tournament of Books
Shortlist
Here are the books, brackets, and judges for the 2024 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes.
DECEMBER 6, 2023
Coming March 6, 2024: the 20th year of the Tournament of Books.
Which sure is a long time to do anything, much less trying—year after year, in vain—to convince 19 authors (and counting) to accept a live chicken as their trophy for winning this competition of ours. But the prize isn’t the point. Neither, really, is the Tournament, which began as a joke, evolved into a tradition, and has become—thanks to you—a month-long hotbed of vibrant literary discussion.
A big reason all this has happened for so long is because of the tremendous support of our presenting sponsor Field Notes. Every year, Rosecrans mentions how he’s a devout Field Notes annual subscriber, and I—this is Andrew—am here to tell you that just last month I saw his current, travel-weary Field Notes notebook, and it was still holding strong despite probably being used, by the looks of it, to wipe down a chainsaw. This is all to say that we highly endorse their goods, and we thank them for their partnership.
We’ll also be joined by one of our favorite bookstores—Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic—as a media partner this year!
The other big reason we’re here is our Sustaining Members. Their support truly makes this event take place. If you aren’t a Sustainer yet, it only takes a moment to join the crew today and play a role in keeping this event rolling. Sustaining Members also get 50 percent off everything at the Tournament of Books store. They also get our deep gratitude and affection.
So, here’s how the Tournament of Books works. Each weekday, starting March 6, two books from the shortlist are read and evaluated by one of our judges. One of the books is chosen to advance to the next round, and the judge explains how they came to their decision, then the commentariat—people like you—express their feelings and thoughts about that decision and the books themselves. And the next day we do it all over again. This goes on, match after match through the month of March, until our championship match, where all our judges convene to decide which of our two finalists wins the Tournament of Books, and with it our prize, the Rooster. (No one’s ever accepted the actual live rooster we offer them, nor are we sure how we’d actually manage the process if someone said yes.)
One thing to note before we go: We need your Zombie vote before midnight Eastern Thursday, Dec. 14. The Zombie poll is now closed. Thank you to all who voted! By way of explanation: From the play-in round to the eight opening round matches, to the four quarterfinal matches, through the two semifinal matches, the field gets whittled down to two finalists. However, before those books can enter the championship, they must endure a “Zombie Round,” which restores two books that were eliminated previously during gameplay. As to which books return, it’s determined by a popular vote, right here, right now, using the form below.
We’ll have more to announce as the Tournament approaches—so make sure you’re signed up for the Rooster newsletter to stay up with all the news. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you soon!
FROM OUR SPONSOR
THIS YEAR’S COMPETITORS
The 2024 Tournament of Books shortlist
The below book descriptions are excerpted from publishers’ summaries and edited for length. We get a cut from purchases made through the book links. Here is a spreadsheet of the full list as well as a Bookshop list.
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American Mermaid
by Julia Langbein
Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist, eco-warrior novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. But when Hollywood insists she convert her fierce, androgynous protagonist into to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her fictional mermaid come to life, enacting revenge against society’s limited view of what a woman can and should be?
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Big Swiss
by Jen Beagin
Greta lives in a Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, NY, spending her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she calls Big Swiss. One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship.
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Blackouts
by Justin Torres
A young man tends to a dying soul, Juan Gay, who has a project to pass along, one built around a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains early-20th-century accounts from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose work was then co-opted, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page.
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Boys Weekend
by Mattie Lubchansky
Sammie is invited to a bachelor weekend, but though they have not identified as a man for over a year, Sammie’s college buddies haven’t quite gotten the message. Arriving at the hotel, Sammie immediately questions their decision to come. Bad enough they have to suffer through a torrent of passive-aggressive comments from the groom’s pals, they also seem to be the only one who’s noticed the mysterious cult that’s also staying at the hotel, and is ritually dismembering guests and demanding fealty to their bloodthirsty god.
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Brainwyrms
by Alison Rumfitt
When a transphobic woman bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it. As the media descends like vultures, Frankie meets Vanya. Mysterious, beautiful, terrifying Vanya. The two hit it off immediately, but as their relationship intensifies, so too does Frankie’s feeling that Vanya is hiding something from her. When Vanya’s secrets threaten to tear them apart, Frankie starts digging, and unearths a sinister, depraved conspiracy, the roots of which go deeper than she ever imagined.
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Chain-Gang All-Stars
by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Loretta and Hamara are the stars of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a popular, controversial, profit-raising program in America’s private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. As her final matches approach, Thurwar considers how she might help her fellow prisoners, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in her path have devastating consequences.
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Cold People
by Tom Rob Smith
The world has fallen. Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet. There are no negotiations. All they have is a message: humanity has 30 days to reach the one place on Earth where they will be allowed to exist—Antarctica. We follow the perilous journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus. As they cling to life on the ice, they must also confront the urgent challenge: Can they build a new society in the sub-zero cold?
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Dayswork
by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
A woman spends her time during the pandemic sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville, becoming increasingly obsessed by what Melville’s devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.
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The Guest
by Emma Cline
A misstep at a party on the East End of Long Island, and the man Alex has been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, Alex stays around and drifts through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
When a skeleton is found at the bottom of a well, who it was and how it got there were secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, a rundown neighborhood in Pottstown, Pa. Two of those residents were Moshe and Chona Ludlow. When the state came looking for a deaf boy, Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater, kept the boy safe. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, it’s clear that even in dark times, it is love and community that sustain us.
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The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
by Debra Magpie Earling
Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, the young Sacajewea is bright and bold. When her village is raided, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, she learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer the world she loves.
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Monstrilio
by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased 11-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.
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Open Throat
by Henry Hoke
A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,” our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.”
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The Shamshine Blind
by Paz Pardo
It’s 2009, and the US has been a second-rate power for a quarter-century, ever since Argentina’s victory in the Falkland’s War thanks to their development of “psychopigments.” Created as weapons, these chemicals can produce human emotions upon contact, and have been embraced for pharmacological and recreational purposes. Just outside the ruins of San Francisco, Psychopigment Enforcement Agent Kay Curtida works a beat chasing down smalltime crooks. When an old friend shows up with a tantalizing lead on a big case, little does she know where it will lead.
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What You Are Looking for Is in the Library
by Michiko Aoyama
What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose.
The play-in round
This year’s theme is “new books by authors whose other works include novels that, over our 20-year-span, were notable Commentariat favorites.”
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The Auburn Conference
by Tom Piazza
It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation.
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The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And 12-year-old PJ is putting the final touches on his grand plan to run away from home.
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The Librarianist
by Patrick deWitt
Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in Portland, Ore. One morning he encounters an elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.
The brackets
Download a copy, make your picks, and get ready for the action in 2024.
WIELDING THE GAVELS
Our 2024 Judges
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Nicole Acheampong
Nicole Acheampong’s (she/her) writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She's an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine and is based in Brooklyn.
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Kyle Chayka
Kyle Chayka (he/him) is a staff writer at The New Yorker who writes Infinite Scroll, a column about culture on the internet. His second book, Filterworld, on the flattening effects of algorithmic feeds, will be published by Doubleday in January 2024. His first book, The Longing for Less, on the legacy of minimalism in art and life, was published in 2020.
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Anna E. Clark
Anna E. Clark (she/her) is a writer, critic, and academic. Her essays and reviews appear in Alta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and Public Books, among other outlets, while her scholarly work has been published in journals such as ELH and Victorian Review. In 2019, she edited an edition of the Wilkie Collins novella The Dead Alive for Broadview Press. She received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where her work considered character and voice in the 19th-century novel. She lives in San Diego, Calif., where she teaches writing and literary studies.
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Natashia Deón
Natashia Deón (she/her) is a two-time NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee in Fiction, a practicing criminal attorney, and author of the critically acclaimed novels, GRACE and The Perishing. GRACE was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and awarded Best Debut Novel by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. A PEN America Fellow, Deón has also been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Prague’s Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a professor of creative writing at Yale, UCLA, and Antioch University. Her personal essays have been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, American Short Fiction, BuzzFeed News, and other places.
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Johanna Fateman
Johanna Fateman (she/her) is a writer, art critic, and musician. She writes regularly for 4Columns, and often for Bookforum and The Whitney Review. She is a former contributing editor for Artforum and her reviews appeared weekly in the “Goings On About Town” section of The New Yorker for many years. Last summer, her band, Le Tigre, toured for the first time since 2005.
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Isaac Fellman
Isaac Fellman (he/him) is a writer and archivist from San Francisco. He is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Notes From a Regicide, upcoming in 2025, as well as Dead Collections, The Two Doctors Górski, and The Breath of the Sun. You can follow him on Bluesky and subscribe to his newsletter.
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Tajja Isen
Tajja Isen (she/her) is the author of the essay collection Some of My Best Friends, named a Best Book of the Year by outlets including Electric Literature, The Globe and Mail, and CBC Books. The former editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine, she has also co-edited the anthology The World as We Knew It and edited for The Walrus, where she is currently a contributing writer. Her next book, Tough Love, is a memoir of mentorship, ambition, and obsession. She’s based in Brooklyn but is spending spring 2024 in Las Vegas as a Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow.
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Dan Kois
Dan Kois (he/him) is a longtime writer and editor at Slate. He's the author of three nonfiction books, Facing Future, The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler), and How to Be a Family. His first novel, Vintage Contemporaries, was published in 2023; his second, Hampton Heights, will be published in the fall of 2024. He lives in Arlington, Va., with his family.
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Stephen Krause
Stephen Krause (he/they) has been selling books for over a decade. Most recently he worked at Malvern Books and is currently a book buyer and cofounder of Alienated Majesty Books in Austin, Texas. He has also worked for Dalkey Archive, Deep Vellum, and The New York Review of Books.
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Elizabeth Minkel
Elizabeth Minkel (she/her) is a journalist and editor who’s written about books, fandom, and digital culture for WIRED, The New Yorker, The Guardian, the New Statesman, The Millions, and more. She’s the co-host of the long-running Fansplaining podcast and co-curator of The Rec Center, a weekly fan culture newsletter that was a finalist for the Hugo Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Orlando.
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Leah Schnelbach
Leah Schnelbach (they/them!) is the features editor for Tor.com and a fiction editor for No Tokens. Their fiction, nonfiction, and interviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Electric Literature, among other estimable places. Turn-ons include Cate Blanchett’s Ocean’s 8 wardrobe, good espresso, and exhaustively researched oral histories of obscure topics; turn-offs include the phrase “elevated horror,” unnecessary prequels, and the death of the author.
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Dan Sheehan
Dan Sheehan (he/him) is a writer and editor from Dublin, Ireland. His debut novel, Restless Souls, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named one of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Great Debuts of 2018. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, Oprah.com, GQ, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is the editor-in-chief of Book Marks at Literary Hub, and lives in western Wyoming with his wife, daughter, and dog.
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Dan Sinykin
Dan Sinykin (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at Emory University and the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed Book Publishing and American Literature.
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Lucy Tan
Lucy Tan (she/her) is author of the novel What We Were Promised, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a Best Book of 2018 by The Washington Post. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Lucy is originally from New Jersey. She lives and writes in Seattle.
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Rufi Thorpe
Rufi Thorpe (she/her) received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. She is the author of The Girls From Corona Del Mar, Dear Fang, With Love, and her most recent, The Knockout Queen, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award. Her fourth novel, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is forthcoming from William Morrow at HarperCollins in June 2024. She lives in California with her husband and two sons where she teaches at The Book Incubator.
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Steffan Triplett
Steffan Triplett (he/him) is the author of Bad Forecast, forthcoming on Essay Press, and the chapbook Constraints on DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press. Steffan teaches at the University of Pittsburgh where he is the managing director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP). He is an Essay Editor at The Offing and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Outpost, Lambda Literary, and the National Book Critics Circle.
MOSTLY DEAD IS SLIGHTLY ALIVE
The Zombie poll
Which book should come back for a second chance at this year’s Rooster? Tell us before midnight Eastern on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023.
The Zombie Poll is now closed. Thank you to everyone who voted!