The finalists for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award were announced on Saturday, January 12, at City Lights Books in San Francisco. There are many familiar names and favorites on this list—like Junot Diaz’s long-awaited novel The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao; and John Richardson’s third installment of his sprawling biography, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. There are also a few books familiar from the 2007 National Book Awards: Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying and Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes. One author, the prolific Joyce Carol Oates, is nominated for two different books: The Gravedigger’s Daughter in fiction; and her Journals 1972-1983 in the autobiography category. The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in New York on Thursday, March 6th. Here is the full list of nominees:
Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men. Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter. HarperCollins
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, S. & S.
Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Farrar, Straus
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s
Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone, Free Press
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying, Knopf
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973—1982, Ecco
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia, Random House
Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press
Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago
Criticism
Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon
Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera, Viking
Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt
Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Sam Anderson -- winner
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Emilie Buchwald, writier, editor, and publisher of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis
