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)

NBCC Nominees are announced

From Critical Mass, the NBCC's blog, here are this year's nominees:

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing:
Winner: Steven G. Kellman

The finalists: Ron Charles, Donna Rifkind, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Kathryn Harrison

The Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement:
John Leonard

Nonfiction:
Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East

Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Dave Eggers, What is the What
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Memoir/Autobiography
Donald Antrim, The Afterlife
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise

Poetry
Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory
Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga
W.D. Snodrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

Criticism
Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within
Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon
Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays
Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences

Biography
Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968
Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler