Farrar, Straus & Giroux earned a total of four National Book Award nominees, including three in the fiction category, while the Hachette Books Group also had four and Knopf tallied three nominations. The 20 finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards--winners will be named at the NBA dinner in Manhattan on November 14--were announced this morning in Philadelphia by author and social critic Camille Paglia at the Library Company in Philadelphia, the oldest public library in America.
The nominated books, which had to be written by U.S. citizens and published in the country between December 1, 2006 and November 30, 2007, are:
Fiction:
Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Shepard, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf)
Nonfiction:
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/HBG USA)
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/FSG)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)
Poetry:
Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton)
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (Norton)
Young People's Literature:
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown)
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press)
Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown)
Three 2007 finalists have been finalists in previous years, including Edwidge Danticat (1995), Robert Hass (1996), and Ellen Bryant Voigt (2002).
The November 14 awards dinner will be hosted by writer Fran Lebowitz. Each winner receives $10,000 plus a bronze statue; each Finalist receives a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award. Also at the dinner, Joan Didion will be presented with the 2007 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community will be given to Terry Gross, host and executive producer of National Public Radio's Fresh Air.
