They recently announced the finalists for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The winners will be announced on March 4th. I tend to be more interested in “critics circle” awards when it comes to books and movies. Critics have to read or watch many more books or movies than the average person, and it is their job to pass judgment on this sort of thing. It is also important that they are not “insiders” in their respective industries, thus their choices are relatively unsullied by politics and personality conflicts. Nor is anyone really campaigning for these awards as one might campaign for an Oscar, a Pulitzer, or a Booker. Here are the nominees:
Fiction
- Monica Ali, Brick Lane (Scribner)
- Edward P. Jones, The Known World (Amistad/HarperCollins)
- Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (Knopf)
- Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Tobias Wolff, Old School (Knopf)
General Nonfiction
- Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (Viking)
- Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Doubleday)
- Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy (Knopf)
- Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Scribner)
- William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeney’s)
Biography/Autobiography
- Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador)
- Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards (Yale University Press)
- Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Norton)
Poetry
- Carolyn Forche, Blue Hour (HarperCollins)
- Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf)
- Venus Khoury-Ghata, She Says (Graywolf)
- Susan Stewart, Columbarium (University of Chicago Press)
- Mary Szybist, Granted (Alice James Books)
Criticism
- Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos (Grove)
- Nick Hornby, Songbook (McSweeney’s)
- Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (Walker)
- Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking)
- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
My thoughts: Brick Lane, The Known World, and Gulag continue to make appearances as finalists for major awards. None of the National Book Award winners are even listed as finalists for these awards. McSweeney’s is shown some love for its two most serious and most ambitious releases of the year. Now, if only they would take this as a cue to leave the forced silliness of their other releases behind.
