Award season is hitting a its stride, and this year’s National Book Award finalists have been announced. Looking at our speculative post of a couple weeks ago, we pegged Marilynne Robinson and Aleksandar Hemon as likely fiction finalists (kudos to Garth on guessing both). Joining them is 81-year-old Peter Matthiessen for a book that, as the AP notes, is “an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s.” The other two fiction finalists, meanwhile, are somewhat more obscure. Not making the fiction cut are notable writers like Philip Roth, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Geraldine Brooks. Here’s a list of the finalists in all four categories with bonus links and excerpts where available:
Fiction:
- Home by Marilynne Robinson (excerpt, a most anticipated book)
- The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (excerpt)
- Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (excerpt
- Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (excerpt)
- The End by Salvatore Scibona (excerpt)
Nonfiction:
- This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (excerpt)
- The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (excerpt)
- The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer (excerpt)
- Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler (excerpt)
- The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order by Joan Wickersham (excerpt)
Poetry:
- Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart (in The Quarterly Conversation)
- Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty (poem)
- Creatures of a Day by Reginald Gibbons (poem)
- Without Saying by Richard Howard (poem)
- Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (recordings)
Young People’s Literature:
- Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (excerpt)
- The Underneath by Kathi Appelt (excerpt)
- What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell
- The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (excerpt)
- The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp (excerpt)
