The Booker was awarded Monday, the Nobel Prize will be awarded tomorrow, and today this year’s National Book Award finalists were announced (by John Grisham, no less). Last year the National Book Foundation was vehemently criticized by some and defended by others for nominating five relatively unknown women from New York in the fiction category, but there will likely be less controversy this year as big name (and past winner for World’s Fair in 1986) E.L. Doctorow leads the list. As the Amazon rankings at the time of the announcement indicate, the Mary Gaitskill doesn’t exactly qualify as obscure either. Though not a commercial superstar, another notable nominee is William T. Vollmann. The complete list of nominees in all categories follows:
Fiction
- E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House) (rank: 17)
- Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon) (rank: 786)
- Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (rank: 45,062)
- Rene Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow) (rank: 423,858)
- William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking) (rank: 51,709)
Nonfiction
- Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin)
- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books)
- Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)
Poetry
- John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco)
- Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press)
- W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
- Vern Rutsala, The Moment’s Equation (Ashland Poetry Press)
Young People’s Literature
- Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam)
- Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum)
- Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest)
- Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt)
