National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Named

My goodness, all these awards are making me dizzy. On the heels of the Oscar nominations (Revolutionary Road, by the by, was robbed! Benjamin Button can kiss my furry snarkbutt), the National Book Critics Circle Award (NBCC) finalists have been announced.

The NBCC was founded in 1974 at the famed Algonquin and is comprised of 700 active book reviewers. Not surprisingly, I am not a member.

Past winners include Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), Ian McEwan (Atonement), Philip Roth (The Counterlife and Patrimony: A Love Story), Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), and Mark Doty (My Alexandria).

Here are this year’s nominees.

Fiction Finalists
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. (Farrar, Straus)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus)
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge (Random)

Poetry Finalists
August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss)
Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
Pierre Martory (translated by John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Finalists
Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)
Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT)
Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday)
Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press)
Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)

Biography Finalists
Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad)
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family In An American Century (Penguin Press)
Patrick. French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf)

Autobiography Finalists
Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
Helene Cooper, The House On Sugar Beach (Simon and Schuster)
Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter (WW Norton)
Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves Of Heaven (Harmony Books)
Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)

Nonfiction Finalists
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (Knopf)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday)
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (Atlantic)
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)

Balakian Finalists (for excellence in reviewing)
Michael Antman
Ron Charles (winner)
Kathryn Harrison
Laila Lalami
Todd Shy

This year’s winner of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is the Pen American Center.

 

Story Source  NBCC  |  Image Source  Discovery Education

January 26, 2009 | Filed Under Eyes on the Prize 

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