Here’s a press release I just received and wanted to pass along to those of you who love books. (I’m not going to italicize all these titles because it didn’t come to me that way — and I don’t have time to make it look pretty.)
January 14, 2006 – The Board of the National Book Critics Circle today selected the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards for the publishing year 2005 in the categories of fiction, general nonfiction, biography, autobiography (new this year), criticism and poetry…The winners will be announced on March 3 at the organization’s 32nd annual awards ceremony.
At the ceremony, the NBCC will also present the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award to Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Press in Wainscot, NY and editor of the annual Pushcart Prize anthology.
In addition, the NBCC will award its Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing to Wyatt Mason, a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker and The New Republic. The award, named after a longtime supporter of the organization and an editor at the New York Times Book Review, is presented annually to a member who has demonstrated the highest critical standards in his or her work. The other finalists were Allen Barra, Katherine A. Powers and Carlin Romano.
The National Book Critics Circle is the country’s leading organization of book critics and book review editors, with some 500 members. It was founded in 1974 to honor book criticism in all media, and to create a means for critics, reviewers and their editors to communicate with one another about their profession.
Last year’s NBCC winners were Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (fiction), Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation: A History (general nonfiction), Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s De Kooning: An American Master (biography/autobiography), Patrick Neate’s Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet (criticism), and Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins (poetry).
The finalists are:
Fiction:
E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House)
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon)
Andrea Levy, Small Island (Picador)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Alfred A. Knopf)
William Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking)
General Nonfiction:
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press)
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Alfred A. Knopf)
Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (Pantheon)
Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Henry Holt)
Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War (Henry Holt)
Biography:
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Alfred A. Knopf)
Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (Continuum International)
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster)
Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (Free Press)
Autobiography:
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)
Francine du Plessix Gray, Them: A Memoir of Parents (Penguin Press)
Judith Moore, Fat Girl: A True Story (Hudson Street Press)
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (Alfred A. Knopf)
Vikram Seth, Two Lives (HarperCollins)
Criticism:
Hal Crowther, Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-millennial South (Louisiana State Univ. Press)
Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
William Logan, The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (Columbia University Press)
John Updike, Still Looking: Essays on American Art (Alfred A. Knopf)
Eliot Weinberger, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (New Directions)
Poetry:
Simon Armitage, The Shout (Harcourt)
Manuel Blas de Luna, Bent to the Earth (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press)
Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Alfred A. Knopf)
Richard Siken, Crush (Yale University Press)
Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books)
