2012 National Book Award Finalists Announced (With Excerpts and Bonus Links)

The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night and the hardware keeps piling up for Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall has already taken home the Booker Prize (and is in the running for the Rooster). Mantel’s book has also held a spot in our Top Ten of late.

In the non-fiction category, the prize went to The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes. In the criticism category, the prize went to Eula Biss’ Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, which was endorsed by both Nick Flynn and Cristina Henríquez in our Year in Reading last year.

Rounding out the rest of the winners, autobiography went to Diana Athill for Somewhere Towards the End, biography to Blake Bailey for Cheever, and poetry to Rae Armantrout for Versed.

This year’s “Genius grant” winners have been announced. The MacArthur grant awards $500,000, “no strings attached” to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Alongside, scientists, artists and scholars are some newly minted geniuses with a literary focus. This year’s literary geniuses are:

If you weren’t already aware that The Wire was a special TV show, then perhaps its creator David Simon receiving a genius grant will persuade you. The show and its creator have already been written up and effusively praised by cultural arbiters like the New Yorker, the series has been analyzed in academic journals, and the travails of McNulty, Bunk, Omar and the rest are now the subject of numerous college courses, so the conferring of geniusness on this particular corner of the small screen should really come as no surprise, a final confirmation of The Wire’s unique contribution to the medium and to the culture at large. We include Simon in the “literary” camp of the latest crop of geniuses because he and his show have been of enduring interest to the literary set (for example). Simon’s credits also include Homicide: Life on the Streets and his new series Treme.

Yiyun Li has been having a good year. First she was named to the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list, and now she has joined some very esteemed company (Deborah Eisenberg, Aleksandar Hemon, Edward P. Jones, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Powers, George Saunders, David Foster Wallace, etc.) among the few dozen literary writers who have been honored by the MacArthur Foundation over the years. Li’s stories are typically set in her native China and she wields a darkness and weightiness of tone that she has used to carve out a place for herself among the broader community of first generation immigrant writers. Her debut collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers came out in 2005, followed by a novel, The Vagrants, and then another collection of stories this fall, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Li participated in our “Best of the Millennium” series last year, and wrote up Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses for us.

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed deserves much of the credit for our reconsideration of Thomas Jefferson over the last two decades, particularly his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and the overall implications of slave ownership among the country’s founding fathers. The Harvard law professor’s books on the topic include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. The latter book won Gordon-Reed the National Book Award in 2008.

In a welcome change of pace from the customarily masculine lists of years past, the 2013 Booker Prize longlist is notable because women outnumber men. The thirteen novels on this year’s “Booker Prize dozen” are from an eclectic mix of up-and-comers as well as established heavy hitters. Interestingly, only Colm Tóibín and Jim Crace have previously been featured on Booker longlists. Meanwhile NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton, Eve Harris, and Donal Ryan are each making their first appearances. This year’s longlist is among the most diverse ever put out by the Booker judges. In total, seven different countries are represented by the authors of these books.

All the Booker Prize longlisters are below (with excerpts where available):

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (excerpt)
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (review)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (publisher synopsis)
Harvest by Jim Crace (excerpt)
The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris
The Kills by Richard House (author interview)

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (excerpt)
Unexploded by Alison MacLeod
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann (Millions review, author interview)

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson (YouTube video of author discussion)
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (review)

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan (YouTube video of author reading)

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Millions review, excerpt)