The 2015 National Book Awards were announced, and a great high-five to you if you read any of the winners already.

Book award season has generally passed, except for a few notable honors--like the National Book Awards, which were handed out last night.

Given out in only four categories (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people's literature), over a thousand submissions are looked over every year. This means the next time you go to Barnes & Noble, you'll see a little table in a corner with these four books stacked, a little green sign that says "National Book Award Winners," and each book will have a little circular sticker-ma-bob on it saying it's an award winner.

Then you know you can buy it, stick it on a shelf at home, and look fantastically intelligent to friends and strangers alike. Ta-dah!

The winners are:

fiction:

Adam Johnson, Fortune Smile: Stories

Johnson, as the book cover so proudly proclaims, also won a Pulitzer for his previous book, The Orphan Master's Son.

Not necessarily a bestselling name, Johnson is a winner of more and more of the big literary awards--and that's how this process works. Win one, and the domino effect occurs. Critics coo, you win awards and prizes like you're on a game show, and middle America thinks you're Adam Johnson, the store manager at the local A&P.

nonfiction:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Coates has worked for just about every major news publication in the United States. Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Atlantic have all had work by Coates published.

And he just turned 40. I hope to get published in my own diary by the time I'm 40.

poetry:

Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus

For someone with a resume that covers a wall of text of awards,
this is Lewis's poetry debut.

Kind of makes you wish you didn't binge watch The Walking Dead all last weekend and do something with your life, huh?

young people's literature:

Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

When did Young Adult books become Young People? Did I miss something? Was there a press release about this at some point?

I don't read much Young People's books, so let's all assume Challenger Deep is about a boy tied to a string deep in the Marianas Trench. Sounds intriguing to me.