Small and medium-sized trade operations dominated the National Book Awards shortlist announced last week, accounting for 11 of the 20 spots. Norton, Holt, Houghton, Harcourt, Copper Canyon, Candlewick and Basic were among names on the list for the 2002 prizes, some more than once.
Among large houses, Random took the most spots with four, and Penguin Putnam scored three. S&S, which won the nonfiction prize last year for The Noonday Demon, received only one, in Young People's Literature, while perennial favorite Farrar, Straus & Giroux was shut out entirely.
The list was filled with surprises, particularly on the fiction side. Books by Donna Tartt, Stephen Carter, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jeffrey Eugenides were all passed over in favor of lesser-known names like Julia Glass and Brad Watson.
The prizes will be announced on November 20 at the Marriott Marquis in New York City, at a ceremony hosted by Steve Martin. That evening, Philip Roth will be given the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
The nominees for fiction are Mark Costello, Big If (Norton); Julia Glass, Three Junes (Pantheon); Adam Haslett, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Doubleday/Talese); Martha McPhee, Gorgeous Lies (Harcourt); and Brad Watson, The Heaven of Mercury (Norton).
Nonfiction nominees include Robert Caro, Master of the Senate (Knopf); Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water (Basic Books); Atul Gawande, Complications (Holt/ Metropolitan); Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (Viking); and Stephen Olson, Mapping Human History (Houghton Mifflin).
The nominees for young people's literature are M.T. Anderson, Feed (Candlewick); Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion (Atheneum/Jackson); Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (HarperCollins/Greenwillow); Elizabeth Partridge, This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life & Songs of Woody Guthrie (Viking); Jacqueline Woodson, Hush (G.P. Putnam's Sons).
The poetry nominees are Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (Univ. of California Press); Sharon Olds, The Unswept Room (Knopf); Alberto Ríos, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon); Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon); and Ellen Bryant Voigt, Shadow of Heaven (Norton).
