nbcc award shortlist announced
The National Book Critics Circle announced on Saturday night the finalists for this year's NBCC Awards. The event took place at Housing Works Bookstore Café in Manhattan (incidentally, one of the few brick-and-mortars in the States where you can find copies of Surreal Botany), and covered books published in 2008 in the categories of fiction, general nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, and criticism. Here's the breakdown:
Fiction Finalists
The National Book Critics Circle also announced that the winner of this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is the PEN American Center. Winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to Ron Charles.
It feels a bit strange that one writing organization that I belong to has given an award to another writing organization that I belong to, but PEN does excellent work, and I'm glad they're getting recognized for it.
The NBCC Awards Ceremony will take place on 12 March at The New School University’s Tishman Auditorium.
Fiction Finalists
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
- Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
- Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
- M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
- Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge (Random House)
- August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
- Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
- Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
- Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
- Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)
- Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)
- Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT Press)
- 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 from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)
- 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)
- Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
- Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach (Simon & Schuster)
- Honor Moore, The Bishop's Daughter (Norton)
- Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books)
- Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise (Algonquin Books)
- 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 Monthly Press)
- George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)
The National Book Critics Circle also announced that the winner of this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is the PEN American Center. Winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to Ron Charles.
It feels a bit strange that one writing organization that I belong to has given an award to another writing organization that I belong to, but PEN does excellent work, and I'm glad they're getting recognized for it.
The NBCC Awards Ceremony will take place on 12 March at The New School University’s Tishman Auditorium.