2025 National Book Awards

Novelists sometimes behave like rogue cabdrivers, says Martin Amis. “Half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.” The Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine should know. Flag down a Beiruti taxi; the guy gestures hop in. Where exactly? There’s a family of five in the back, two kids in the passenger seat. (It’s what you get when the fare’s flat, paid per head.) So get in. Take a forced tour of the city’s laneless roads. Not infrequently you’ll scuff, nudge, bump, butt, rap, tap other cars, maybe pedestrians. Nothing serious. Shrug off the irritation like Mediterranean dust off your collar and move on. The 2025 National Book Awards ceremony was a slightly grimier and more taxing experience than that.

Alameddine won this year’s award for fiction by taking American letters exactly nowhere. The True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) might have been a fine novel about the historic absurdities of late 20th-century Lebanon, but that would’ve required the author to say something substantive and, well, novel about the historic absurdities of late 20th-century Lebanon. Or it could’ve been a fine story about comic and tragic and awkward and piercing familial intimacy among Middle Easterners, but that probably wouldn’t have won a national award. Alameddine had to attempt both.

About the Author

Vahaken Mouradian

Vahaken Mouradian is the literary editor of National Review.

Featured Tags

Novelists sometimes behave like rogue cabdrivers, says Martin Amis. “Half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.” The Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine should know. Flag down a Beiruti taxi; the guy gestures hop in. Where exactly? There’s a family of five in the back, two kids in the passenger seat. (It’s what you get when the fare’s flat, paid per head.) So get in. Take a forced tour of the city’s laneless roads. Not infrequently you’ll scuff, nudge, bump, butt, rap, tap other cars, maybe pedestrians. Nothing serious. Shrug off the irritation like Mediterranean dust off your collar and move on. The 2025 National Book Awards ceremony was a slightly grimier and more taxing experience than that.

Alameddine won this year’s award for fiction by taking American letters exactly nowhere. The True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) might have been a fine novel about the historic absurdities of late 20th-century Lebanon, but that would’ve required the author to say something substantive and, well, novel about the historic absurdities of late 20th-century Lebanon. Or it could’ve been a fine story about comic and tragic and awkward and piercing familial intimacy among Middle Easterners, but that probably wouldn’t have won a national award. Alameddine had to attempt both.