The list of the 2003 National Book Award finalists is notably lacking in young, hip novelists and blockbuster nonfiction. And unlike last year, when many nominees came from small and midsize publishers, nearly all nominees this year are from the largest publishing companies. The comeback award can already be awarded to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which published three finalists this year, after being shut out of the shortlist in 2002.
In fiction, the list is heavy on veteran writers, some of whom are back with their first book in years. HarperCollins is the only publisher to have more than one finalist in the category, including one from its African-American imprint, Amistad. That book, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, is the debut novel of a writer whose collection of short stories, Lost in the City, was an NBA finalist a decade ago. Other fiction nominees are T.C. Boyle, for Drop City (Penguin Group/Viking); Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire (FSG); Scott Spencer, A Ship Made of Paper (HC/Ecco); and Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen (Simon & Schuster).
In nonfiction, S&S dominates, with its Free Press imprint receiving two nominations—John D'Emilio for Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, and Carlos Eire for Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy—and Scribner receiving one for George Howe Colt's The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home. Random House's Crown (Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America) and Doubleday (Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History) imprints round out the category, where the race seems to be wide open in the absence of anything close to the status of last year's winner, Master of the Senate by Robert Caro.
The Penguin Group garnered the most nominations for the young people's literature category, with its Dial and G.P. Putnam's Sons imprints each making the list, for The River Between Us by Richard Peck and Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson. Peck, a Newbery Medalist, was previously nominated for an NBA in 1998, and Woodson received a nomination in 2002. Polly Horvath, who was nominated in 1999, received another nod for her novel The Canning Season (FSG ); the other two nominees are Paul Fleischman for Breakout (Cricket/Marcato) and Jim Murphy for An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (Clarion).
Even in poetry, traditionally the strongest category for independent publishers, only one small publisher, the prestigious BOA Editions, made the list of finalists. Tiny Copper Canyon, which last year had two poetry finalists and won the category with Ruth Stone's In the Next Galaxy, did not make the shortlist. The nominees are Louis Simpson, The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940—2001 (BOA); Charles Simic, The Voice at 3 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (Harcourt); C.K. Williams, The Singing: Poems (FSG); Carole Muske-Dukes, Sparrow: Poems (Random); and Kevin Young, Jelly Roll: A Blues (Random/Knopf).
