National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees Announced
The National Book Critics Circle announced the nominees today for their yearly NBCC awards, the middle of the three big U.S. book awards (the National Book Awards are in the fall, and the Pulitzers are in the spring). (In a longish interview on The Elegant Variation, NBCC president John Freeman explains the somewhat involved process behind the awards and explains why these awards are unique: unlike the other big ones, they are not chosen by a small, one-time jury of fellow authors, but by the working critics who read and review the year's new books all year long.)
Fiction:
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
- What Is the What by Dave Eggers
- The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Nonfiction:
- The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn
- The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler
- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
- Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama
- The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan
Memoir/Autobiography:
- The Afterlife by Donald Antrim
- Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
- Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters
- The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
- Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz
Biography:
- The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate
- At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch
- Flaubert by Frederick Brown
- James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
- A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler by James Roberts
Poetry:
- My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again by Daisy Fried
- Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore
- Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris
- Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel
- Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems by W.D. Snodgrass
Criticism:
- While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer
- Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays by Frederick Crews
- Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett
- On Looking: Essays by Lia Purpura
- Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler
And see our list of former NBCC winners and nominees. One side note: this list only shares one nominee with this year's National Book Awards: At Canaan's Edge. Let a thousand flowers bloom. --Tom, Amazon Bookstore