>NBCC Award Finalists Announced

>The National Book Critics Circle (of which I’m a member) has announced the finalists for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Awards. (Hooray for Elizabeth Strout and Laila Lalami!)

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 (trans. 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
Michael Antman
Kathryn Harrison
Laila Lalami
Todd Shy

About the author

I am the author of three novels--THE LAST BIRD OF PARADISE, OLIVER'S TRAVELS, and THE SHAMAN OF TURTLE VALLEY--and three story collections--IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY, HOUSE OF THE ANCIENTS AND OTHER STORIES, and WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW, winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. I am also the co-founder and former editor of Prime Number Magazine and the editor of the award-winning anthology series EVERYWHERE STORIES: SHORT FICTION FROM A SMALL PLANET.

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