Award season is in full swing now. The Booker was awarded yesterday, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature will be announced tomorrow or soon after, but today is all about the finalists for the National Book Award. As Ed remarked, in so many words, for the second year in a row, the judges have managed to deliver a crop of fiction finalists that satisfyingly occupy the sweet spot between obscurity and being, well, too obvious. On to the finalists in all categories, and, where available, excerpts from the books.
Fiction:
- Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski – an excerpt of sorts
- A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus – excerpt
- The Echo Maker by Richard Powers – (very short) excerpt
- Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta – excerpt
- The Zero by Jess Walter – excerpt
Non-fiction:
- At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 by Taylor Branch – excerpt
- Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran – excerpt 1, 2
- The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan – excerpt
- Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present by Peter Hessler – excerpt
- The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright – excerpt
Poetry:
- Averno by Louise Gluck – poem
- Chromatic by H.L. Hix
- Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner – poems
- Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey – poem
- Capacity by James McMichael – poem
Young People’s Literature:
- The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson – excerpt
- Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt
- Sold by Patricia McCormick – excerpt
- The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin
- American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang – pages
