Nine of the 10 nominees for the National Book Critics Circle 2003 awards in fiction and nonfiction were published by large houses; the lone small publisher on the list was McSweeney's, for William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down. The other nonfiction nominees are Carolyn Alexander, The Bounty (Viking); Anne Applebaum, Gulag (Doubleday); Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi (Knopf); and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family (Scribner).
The fiction nominees are Monica Ali, Brick Lane (Scribner); Edward P. Jones, The Known World (HarperCollins/ Amistad); Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (Knopf); Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); and Tobias Wolff, Old School (Knopf).
Nominees in the remaining three categories came from a wide range of publishers. In the biography/autobiography category, the nominees are Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty (Picador); Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (FSG); George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards (Yale Univ. Press); Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce (FSG); and William Taubman, Khrushchev (Norton). The poetry nominees are Carolyn Forche, Blue Hour (HC); Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf); Venus Khoury-Ghata, She Says (Graywolf); Susan Stewart, Columbarium (Univ. of Chicago Press); and Mary Szybist, Granted (Alice James Books).
In criticism the nominees are Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos (Grove); Nick Hornby, Songbook (McSweeney's); Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling (Walker); Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows (Viking); and Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (FSG).
At its March 4 ceremony, NBCC will present its lifetime achievement award to Studs Terkel, while Scott McLemee, senior writer with the Chronicle of Higher Education, will be presented with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
