We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2023 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award. The winner will be announced at the 2023 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony, which will be aired virtually (date and time to be announced).

Big thanks to the following writers for their lists: Vincent Czyz, Renee E. D’Aoust, Hillary Leftwich, Peter Markus, David Naimon, D. A. Powell, Dawn Raffel, Dimitri Reyes, Martha Ronk, John Schertzer, Terese Svoboda, Tony Trigilio, Curtis White, and Angela Woodward.

Without further ado, here are the finalists for the 2023 Big Other Book Readers’ Choice Award:

Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled (Awst Press), translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz

Jeffery Renard Allen’s Fat Time and Other Stories (Graywolf Press)

Leah Angstman’s Shoot the Horses First (Kernpunkt Press)

Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press)

William M. Brandon III’s Eternity (Spaceboy Books)

Lauren Camp’s Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books)

Stacy Hardy’s The Archaeology of Holes (Bridge Books)

Dong Li’s The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press)

Norman Lock’s The Ice Harp (Bellevue Literary Press)

Tony Leuzzi’s Fog Notes (Tiger Bark Press)

Lance Olsen’s Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie (FC2)

Aimee Parkison and Meg Pokrass’s Disappearing Debutantes (Outpost19)

Dawn Raffel’s Boundless as the Sky (Sagging Meniscus Press)

Elizabeth Robinson’s Excursive (Roof Books)

Susan M. Schultz’s Meditations: December 2019-December 2020 (Wet Cement Press)

Cole Swensen’s And And And (Shearsman Books)

Tony Trigilio’s Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press)

Julie Marie Wade’s Otherwise (Autumn House Press)

McKenzie Wark’s Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso Press)

Acid Horizon’s Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape Repeater)

Honorable Mention:

Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones’s The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History (Rose Metal Press)

César Aira’s Fulgentius (New Directions), translated by Chris Andrews

Ashia Ajani’s Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing)

Maureen Alsop‘s Tender to Empress (Wet Cement Press)

Sarah Audsley’s Landlock X (Texas Review Press)

Josh Bell’s Houseboat Veronica (FC2)

Gabriel Blackwell’s Comment Section

Laynie Browne’s Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press)

Julie Carr’s Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press)

Peter Cherches’s Things (Bamboo Dart Press)

Maxine Chernoff’s Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems (Madhat)

Andrew Collard’s Sprawl (Ohio University Press)

Michael Dumanis’s Creature (Four Way Books)

Mathias Énard‘s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild (New Directions), translated by Frank Wynne

Safaa Fathy’s Al-Haschische (Pamenar Press), translated by Patrick Love and Safaa Fathy

Nona Fernández’s Voyager: Constellations of Memory (Graywolf Press), translated by Natasha Wimmer

Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug Press)

Merrill Joan Gerber’s Revelation at the Food Bank (Sagging Meniscus)

Marie-Andrée Gill’s Heating the Outdoors (Book*hug Press), translated by Kristen Renee Miller

Adam Greenfield’s Mountain Lion Blues (Pelekinesis)

Kelle Groom’s How to Live (Tupelo Press)

Carol Guess’s Sleep Tight Satellite (Tupelo Press)

Byung-Chul Han’s Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East and Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (Polity Press), both translated by Daniel Steuer

Joseph Harrington’s Disapparitions (BlazeVOX)

Katie Hartsock’s Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press)

Erin Hoover’s No Spare People (Black Lawrence Press)

Christine Hume’s Everything I Never Wanted to Know (Mad Creek Books)

Amanda Galvan Huynh‘s Where My Umbilical Is Buried (Sundress Publications)

Marie-Andrée Gill’s Heating the Outdoors (Book*hug Press), translated by Kristen Renee Miller

Brionne Janae’s Because You Were Mine (Haymarket Books)

Charles Jensen’s Spice of Life (Santa Fe Writer’s Project)

Janine Joseph’s Decade of the Brain (Alice James Books)

Jesse Kohn’s The Book of Webs (University of Massachusetts Press)

Jade Lascelles’s Violence Beside (Essay Press)

Ann Lauterbach’s Door (Penguin)

Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism (Tupelo Press)

Annell López’s I’ll Give You a Reason (Feminist Press)

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s Innards (W. W. Norton & Company)

Franca Mancinelli’s All the Eyes That I Have Opened (Black Square Editions), translated by John Taylor

Richard Meier’s A Duration (Wave Books)

Sebastian Merrill’s Ghost::Seeds (Texas Review Press)

Ted Morrissey’s Delta of Cassiopeia (Twelve Winters)

Jefferson Navicky’s Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (AC Books)

Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance Is Mine (Knopf), translated by Jordan Stump

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial (Grove Press)

Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman (Grove Press)

sadé powell’s wordtomydead (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Dimitri Reyes’s Papi Pichón (Get Fresh Publishing)

Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press)

Edgard Telles Ribeiro’s The Impostor (Bellevue Literary Press), translated by Kim M. Hastings and Margaret A. Neves

Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture (Black Cat/Grove Press)

Kim Rosenfield’s Phantom Captain (Fence Books)

Kristin Ross’s The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life (Verso Books)

David Rothenberg’s Whale Music (Terra Nova Press)

Jean-Manuel Roubineau’s The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic (Oxford University Press), translated by Malcolm DeBevoise, and edited by Phillip Mitsis

Ron Sakolsky’s Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination (Eberhardt Press)

Lynn Schmeidler’s Half Lives (Autumn House Press)

Lee Seong-Bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence (Sublunary Editions)

Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Daisuke Shen and Vi Ki Nao’s Funeral (Kernpunkt Press)

Jack Skelley’s The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e))

Martín Solares’s How to Draw a Novel (Grove Press), translated by Heather Cleary

Overkill Omnibus!!!: The Collected, Selected, Unapologetic, Überfluous, Posthumous Poetics of Mark Spitzer 1972-2022 (Spuyten Duyvil)

Robert Steiner’s The Last Judgment (Spuyten Duyvil)

Enzo Silon Surin’s American Scapegoat (Black Lawrence Press)

Tuệ Sỹ’s Dreaming the Mountain (Milkweed Editions), translated by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins

Russell Thorburn’s Let It Be Told in a Single Breath (Cornerstone Press)

Denise Tolan’s Italian Blood (CavanKerry Press)

Steve Tromans’s Rhythmicity and Deleuze: Practice as Research in the Musical-Philosophical (Lexington Books)

Wil Weitzel’s Nights from This Galaxy (Sarabande Books)

John Yau’s Tell It Slant (Omnidawn)

Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom (Pluto), edited by Francis Dupuis-Déri and Benjamin Pillet

(Image: Dickenson V. Alley’s Nikola Tesla, with His Equipment (1899))