Meet Your NBCC Awards Finalists

The National Book Critics Circle announced the shortlists for its 2007 awards over the weekend, and it was a very good year to be Joyce Carol Oates, who received nominations in both the autobiography and fiction categories, for The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. And a good year for editing biographies at Knopf, which took three of the five spots on that list with books about Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, and Pablo Picasso. Not to mention a good year for Flood Editions, a non-profit publisher from Chicago that only put out three books last year and got two of them onto the poetry list.

The only National Book Award nominees to appear on the NBCC’s shortlists are Edwidge Danticat, Arnold Rampersad, and Tim Weiner, spread out over three of the Circle’s nonfiction categories; Junot Diaz, who many were surprised to not see on the NBA’s fiction list, is given a nod here and would probably be considered a lock except for Oates—but, really, who knows? We’ll find out in early March, when the Circle also presents its Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence to Sam Anderson, and a Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award to Emilie Buchwald, founder of Milkweed Editions and Gryphon Press.

⇒Autobiography

• Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water

• Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982
• Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence
• Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary

⇒Nonfiction

• Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism

• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848
• Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

⇒Fiction

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

• Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

⇒Biography

• Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer

• Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton
• Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison
• John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy

⇒Poetry

• Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

• Matthea Harvey, Modern Life
• Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking
• Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan
• Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems

⇒Criticism

• Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints

• Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera
• Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream
• Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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