National Book Critics Circle Nominees Announced

The National Book Critics Circle announced the nominees for their six annual awards this weekend, and perhaps because these awards reflect a critics' consensus more than other prizes with smaller juries (NBCC president Jane Ciabattari explains their process on the Daily Beast), you'll see many familiar names from the year-end best lists (11 of the 31 nominees were in our own editors' Top 100). Only four, though (Nothing to Envy, Just Kids, The Eternal City, and Lighthead), are holdovers from the National Book Award nominees. The NBCC, unlike the other major US awards, is open to books written by non-Americans, which, as usual, doesn't actually mean there are that many non-US nominees, although it did open the door this year to three non-Americans in the fiction category, two in translation. I was very happy to see my favorite novel of the year, To the End of the Land, among them, and also happy to see favorites like The Possessed, The Professor, How to Live, and Just Kids (not to mention Freedom) there too. The most surprising omissions? Henrietta Lacks, certainly, and Matterhorn, and with an entire category devoted to autobiography (and with an "unprecedented" six nominees because the judges were deadlocked), I'm surprised that the late Tony Judt's wonderful Memory Chalet didn't make it (although his widow, Jennifer Homans, is among the nonfiction contenders).

Fiction:

• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
• To the End of the Land by David Grossman
• Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson
• Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

General Nonfiction:

• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne
• Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Biography:

• How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
• The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings
• Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang
• The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers
• Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by Tom Segev

Memoir/Autobiography:

• Half a Life by Darin Straus
• Just Kids by Patti Smith
• Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 by Kai Bird
• The Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow
• Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
• Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Poetry:

• One with Others by C.D. Wright
• Nox by Anne Carson
• The Eternal City by Kathleen Graber
• Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
• The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

Criticism:

• The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
• The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle
• Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clara Cavanaugh
• The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield
• Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander Monson

Also, winners were announced for their two special awards, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, which went to the Dalkey Archive Press, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, given to Parul Sehgal (the other nominees were Sarah L. Courteau, William Deresiewicz, Ruth Franklin, and Kathryn Harrison). I have to confess that while I know the bylines of all the other nominees, I wasn't familiar with Sehgal, but according to her site, she's the Nonfiction and Audio reviews editor at PW (which no doubt means I've read plenty of her unsigned reviews without knowing it), and she's reviewed for Bookforum, Time Out NY, and other places, and you can see her reviews of three of the nominees above: The Cruel Radiance, The Warmth of Other Suns, and The Emperor of All Maladies.

The winners of the other prizes will be announced March 10, and the NBCC will be writing about all the nominees on their blog, Critical Mass, in the meantime. --Tom