The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its book awards on Saturday at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York. Making the shortlist for fiction were Wolf Hall (Holt) by Hilary Mantel (who won this year's Man Booker Award), as well as American Salvage, a collection of stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell published by Wayne State University Press, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Mary Karr got a nod in the autobiography category for Lit (Harper), and bios about John Cheever, Clarice Lispector and Flannery O'Connor filled some of the biography slots. In total, Macmillan's imprints had five nominees and Random House landed four finalist spots. Graywolf, Norton, and Penguin all had multiple books named.
This year’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Joyce Carol Oates, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing goes to Joan Accocela. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on March 12. The full list of finalists follows.
Autobiography:
Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
Edmund White, City Boy (Bloomsbury)
Biography:
Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)
Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)
Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)
Criticism:
Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)
Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)
Fiction:
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
Michelle Huneven, Blame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)
Nonfiction:
Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)
Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains (Random House)
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)
Poetry:
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
D.A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960—2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)
