2012 National Book Award Finalists Include Veterans and Newcomers

The 2012 National Book Award finalists were announced this morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the first time they've been announced on television. This year's list of finalists includes a number of familiar literary faces, as well as some relative unknowns. In particular, Domingo Martinez woke up this morning to discover himself listed among nonfiction giants Anne Applebaum, Katherine Boo, Robert Caro, and Anthony Shadid-all of whom have won Pulitzers. Mr. Martinez lives in Seattle, and his Amazon author page says, "He lives awkwardly in a small 1930s apartment building on lower Queen Anne, enjoying the absence of sunlight." Today must feel a little less awkward.

The fiction list features two relative newcomers, both debut novelists who've written exceptional war novels (and both Amazon Best of the Month selections). Of Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Amazon Senior Editor Neal Thompson wrote, "With fierce and fearless writing, Fountain is a writer worth every accolade about to come his way." Now that includes being nominated for an NBA. Amazon Senior Editor Jon Foro was equally effusive of Kevin Powers' debut Yellow Birds, writing "Powers, an Iraq veteran, eyes the casual violence of war with a poet's precision but without romanticism, moving confidently between scenes of blunt atrocity and almost hallucinatory detachment with Hemingway-like economy and prose that shimmers like desert heat."

Here's the full list of finalists:

Fiction

Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney's Books)

Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown and Company)

Nonfiction

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday)

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf)

Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press)

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Poetry

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)

Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies (Southern Illinois University Press)

Tim Seibles, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press)

Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Susan Wheeler, Meme (University of Iowa Press)

Young People's Literature

William Alexander, Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)

Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach (Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)

Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down (Balzer+Bray, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Eliot Schrefer, Endangered (Scholastic)

Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon
(Flash Point, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press)