NBCC Award Finalists

For more info on the awards, please visit Critical Mass. They have live blogging and all kinds of good stuff.

Autobiography

• Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone by Joshua Clark (Free Press)
• Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
• The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)
• Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky (Verso)
• Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya (Random House)

Nonfiction

• American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura (FSG)
• What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford University Press)
• Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington (Doubleday)
• Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)

Fiction

• Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (HarperCollins)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
• In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar (Dial)
• The Gravediggers Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates (HarperCollins)
• The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins (S&S)

Biography

• Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (Yale University Press)
• Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee (Knopf)
• Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad (Knopf)
• The Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson (Knopf)
• Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin (Penguin)

Poetry

• Elegy by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)
• Modern Life by Matthea Harvey (Graywolf)
• Sleeping and Waking by Michael O'Brien (Flood)
• The Ballad of Jamie Allan by Tom Pickard (Flood)
• New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz (Archipelago)

Criticism

• Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella (Pantheon)
• Once Upon a Quniceanera by Julia lvarez (Viking)
• The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi (Metropolitan/Holt)
• Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff (FSG)
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross (FSG)