The call came in on a Tuesday afternoon in November, at 3:47 PM, from a number in Brooklyn I did not recognize. I was in the checkout line of a bookshop in Providence, holding a novel by Bohumil Hrabal I had bought and re-bought and given away four times, and I answered because I had been expecting a different call — from the plumber — and I said, in that impatient way one says hello when one is expecting a plumber, "Yes?"

The voice on the other end said, "Mr. Delshad, this is the chair of the board of the American Book Awards, and we would like to invite you to chair the 2026 fiction panel."

I said, "The 2026 fiction panel."

She said, "Yes, the 2026 fiction panel."

I said, "Of the American Book Awards."

She said, "Yes, Mr. Delshad." And then, because she is a person of some patience: "You will have some questions."

I had, in the moment, four questions, which I asked her in that order: How many books; how many panelists; when does it begin; when does it end. She answered them in the way I have since discovered she answers most things — in the fewest words that will do the work — and then said: "You will want to think about it. I will call you back on Friday."

Part I. What one thinks about, in eight weeks.

Between the Tuesday call and the Friday one, and then the Friday one and the appointment letter, and then the appointment letter and the arrival of the boxes in the first week of January, I had eight weeks in which to think about what I had agreed to do. What I thought about, mostly, was weight.

A book is a heavy object. The average trade paperback novel weighs, I have since measured, about eleven ounces. The average hardcover — of the kind still sent to the panels — weighs about twenty-two ounces. Four hundred and seventeen hardcovers, at twenty-two ounces each, come to about five hundred and seventy-three pounds. That is, roughly, the weight of a modest upright piano, or a young horse, or four adult panelists reading simultaneously.

I have thought, since, about why the physical weight bothered me — why I kept doing the math, in eight weeks of thinking about the panel, on the physical weight — when what I was going to be asked to do was to read the books, and reading is not, on the whole, a physical activity. And I have come to think, tentatively, that it bothered me because I had already understood, on the Tuesday call, that I was going to be asked to do something the mind was not built for, and I was reaching for the body's version of it. The mind, asked to read four hundred and seventeen books in ten months, does not weigh five hundred and seventy-three pounds. It weighs much more.

Part II. On agreeing to it anyway.

I said yes because I had been told, by four previous chairs, that the writing of the citation is the hardest thing they had ever done, and I have wanted, for as long as I have been a writer, to do the hardest thing four writers I admired had ever done. I said yes because I have never once, in my life as a writer, understood a book better than in the week I found out other people had also read it. I said yes because Marion Deutsch, in 1980, said the prize would exist "because reading has become a business we can no longer trust to businessmen," and I have been trying, for a while now, to place myself somewhere other than in the business of it.

And I said yes because I had read, in 2011, the first book by Marilynne Robinson to have won this prize, and I have not stopped, since, being embarrassed that I had waited until 2011 to read a book that had been available since 1980. I did not want to be, in 2036, embarrassed to say that I had not read, in 2026, the book by a writer twenty-three years younger than me that I hope she is currently writing.

Part III. The boxes.

The boxes arrived on a Thursday in the first week of January, on a truck from a warehouse in Long Island City, in twelve cardboard crates that the driver stacked in my hallway with the kind of professional indifference that made me feel, briefly, ridiculous. I signed for them. I closed the door. I sat down on the floor of the hallway, next to the boxes, and I did not open them for two hours.

And then I opened them.

Inside the first box, at the top, was a novel by a writer I had never heard of, from a press I had never heard of, in a print run of, per the copyright page, one thousand two hundred. It was called A Small House on the Longest Road, and I sat down on the floor next to the boxes and I read the first sentence, which I will not quote here because it is not the panel's to quote yet. And then I read the second sentence. And then, because I had, at that point, four hundred and sixteen more books to read, I closed the book and I put it back in the box.

Except I did not put it back in the box. I put it on the shelf next to my desk. Because that is, I thought, why one says yes to the panel: to find the book that one puts on the shelf next to one's desk in the first hour of the year, and to spend the next ten months finding out whether one was right.

— K.D.

Kaveh Delshad is the chair of the 2026 fiction panel. His novel The Long Room was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2022. He lives in Providence.

ii.

In Conversation

Three Questions with Mira Chen.

The 2025 fiction laureate, three days after the ceremony, at the Cormorant Press offices in Brooklyn.

By Priya Anand · 2,200 words

Mira Chen answered the door of the Cormorant Press office in Brooklyn on a Wednesday morning in November, wearing a jacket that was, she said, forty-one years old. It had belonged, she said, to her mother. It had been altered, twice, by her mother, and once, in 1997, by her. It was a very good jacket. It had never, she said, been photographed.

We sat on the couch in the front room. She had brought — for reasons I did not, then, understand — a small spool of red thread. Over the following hour, she uncoiled about two inches of it, running the strand between her thumb and forefinger while she spoke. I did not ask her why, and she did not say. What follows is a condensed transcript. — P.A.

On the word attend.

P.A. — The citation, which you have said you cried at, uses the word attended. Can you say what you understand by it, in the context of this book?

M.C. — I don't think I could have said it before I read the citation. That was the strange thing. I had been trying, in the interviews leading up to the ceremony, to describe the mother, and the aunt, and the woman who folds the wedding dress in Part II — I had been reaching for a word that was not haunted. Because haunted has a direction to it, doesn't it? A ghost haunts a place; a place is haunted by something. And what I was after — what I hope the book is after — is a condition of being attended in every direction at once. By the dead, yes. But also by the living, and by the country you keep not becoming. There is a kind of attention that flows both ways. It is what my mother's threads are, in the book. They are attention.

On the small press.

P.A. — This is your fourth novel and your first with a small press. Was that a decision?

M.C. — It was a decision. I had a very good time at FSG with The Third House, and I had no complaint with anyone there, but I had written a book that I did not think was for a house that could put it on nineteen thousand bookshelves in a first printing. I wanted it to sit on a small shelf for a long time. I don't mean that as a mystical claim. I mean that Cormorant would print two thousand copies, and I could stand behind two thousand copies. I could not stand behind nineteen thousand.

Sam Costigan, at Cormorant, read the manuscript in seven days. He did not ask for changes. That was, I think, the first time in my life a publisher had not asked for changes. He said: I will not change a line, and I will not sell more than four thousand copies of this book in the first year, and I will keep it in print until I die. I said yes.

On what she is reading, now.

P.A. — What are you reading, now that the season is over?

M.C. — I am reading the panel's other four books, because I feel I owe them the attention. I am reading Wendell Foster's A Grammar of the River, from the nonfiction shortlist, which is a book I have wanted to read since April and refused to let myself read until after the ceremony. I am rereading the Housekeeping paperback my mother gave me in 1994. And I am reading a manuscript that I think is by a writer twenty-three years younger than me, and I think she is very good, and I am trying to write her back a letter that will not condescend.

— M.C., in conversation with P.A.

Priya Anand is a novelist and a nonfiction laureate (2020). Her most recent book, What the Wind Was, was published in 2024. She lives in Brooklyn.

iii.

The Long Essay

The Small Presses that Wrote the Decade.

Cormorant, Coffee House, Kore, and Milkweed — a counter-history of American fiction since 2015.

By Frances Ede · 4,100 words

In 2011, the fiction laureate was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In 2012, by Kore Press. In 2013, by Alfred A. Knopf. In 2014, by Little, Brown; in 2015, by Random House. And then, from 2016 onward, in a run that has been remarked on but not yet, I think, sufficiently accounted for: Graywolf, Farrar, Riverhead, New Directions, Coffee House, Coffee House again, Graywolf again, Knopf, Riverhead, and — most recently — Cormorant Press of New York, in a first printing of two thousand copies of a novel called A Country of Ghosts.

Roughly two-thirds of the fiction laureates of the last decade have been published by houses of under one hundred titles per year. Roughly half have been published by houses whose entire annual output could be carried, without rearrangement, on a single library cart. This is, statistically, a break in the pattern of the awards' first thirty-five years, when roughly ninety percent of laureates came from the twelve largest American houses.

What are we to make of this?

The temptation, in my line of work, is to make of it a story of virtue — small = good, large = bad — and I want to resist that temptation, because it is untrue, and because the American Book Awards, which include a small press this year and a very large press the next, have never made that argument. What I want to argue, instead, is that the small presses of the last decade have been publishing a different kind of book, and that the panels have been finding it.

— continued in the full issue —

Frances Ede is a critic and juror. Her essays have appeared in the LRB and the NYRB.

The Departments

Letters & the Reader's Register.

To the editor.

"I am writing from a bookshop in Boise where I have, this month, read twelve of the fifteen books on the 2025 shortlists aloud to my wife, who is nearly blind. I have run out of the Chen and I have written to Cormorant for a second copy, which will not come for two weeks. I do not know how to thank you, but I am writing to try."

— R.H., Boise, ID · in response to Vol. XLV, No. 24.

The Reader's Register.

Fifty-two members of the Reading Room wrote to the foundation this fortnight to name the book they most want to nominate for the 2026 season. Twenty-eight are already on the panel's list. Nine were not. Two of the nine have been recorded in the panel's log. The remainder we will keep for ourselves.

The Colophon

The Reading Room is published fortnightly by the American Book Awards Foundation. Editor: Frances Ede. Assistant editor: Nina Kostrovsky. Illustration: Adaeze Osu. Set in Fraunces and Instrument Sans. Printed, when printed, on Mohawk Superfine at 118 gsm.

This issue was closed on the first of February, 2026, at the foundation's offices in Brooklyn. It runs, in the print edition, to seventy-four pages. It runs, in the digital edition, to what your device chooses to show you.

The Weight of FourHundred and Seventeen Books.