NBCC Announces Finalists…

Do you haunt the prize lists like I do? Well, if you do, then you’ve probably already seen the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle. If not, I thought I’d share them with you:

Autobiography:

• Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill (Norton)
• Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, by Debra Gwartney (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Lit, by Mary Karr (Harper)
• Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, by Kati Marton (Simon & Schuster)
• City Boy, by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

Biography:

• Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey (Knopf)
• Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch (Little, Brown)
• Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, by Benjamin Moser (Oxford University Press)
• Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone, by Stanislao G. Pugliese (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, by Martha A. Sandweiss (Penguin Press)

Criticism:

• Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays, by Eula Biss (Graywolf Press)
• Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, by Stephen Burt (Graywolf Press)
• Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein (Norton)
• Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture, by David Hajdu (Da Capo Press)
• Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, by Greg Milner (Faber)

Fiction:

• American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell (Wayne State University Press)
• The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James(Riverhead)
• Blame, by Michelle Huneven (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
• Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (Holt)
• Lark and Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)

Nonfiction:

• The Hindus: An Alternative History, by Wendy Doniger (Penguin Press)
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books)
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)
• Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder (Random House)
• Imperial, by William T. Vollmann (Viking)

Poetry:

• Versed, by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan)
• A Village Life, by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Chronic, by D.A. Powell (Graywolf Press)
• Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008, by Eleanor Ross Taylor (Louisiana State University Press)
• Museum of Accidents, by Rachel Zucker (Wave Books)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing:

• Joan Acocella

Finalists:

• Michael Antman
• William Deresiewicz
• Donna Seaman
• Wendy Smith

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award:

• Joyce Carol Oates

Have you read any of these? Learn more about the NBCC awards by visiting their blog.