The finalists for the annual National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award have been announced. The fiction list includes one of the biggest fiction releases of last year, but all five of the finalists got a fair amount of ink. No huge surprises. In fact, as we’ve noted in the past, the NBCC seems to do a better job of catching the zeitgeist than other major prizes like the National Book Award and the Booker, which like to play kingmaker by annointing less well known titles. Here are the finalists for fiction and non-fiction with excerpts and other links where available. As a side note, the NBCC award is particularly interesting in that it is one of the few major awards that pits American books against overseas (usually British) books.
Fiction
- Teju Cole, Open City (our review, excerpt)
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write The Marriage Plot, our review, excerpt [pdf])
- Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (our review, The Millions Interview: Alan Hollinghurst Answers his Critics, excerpt)
- Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (excerpt)
- Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (our review, excerpt)
Nonfiction
- Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (excerpt)
- James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Ben Marcus on The Information, excerpt)
- Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (excerpt)
- Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (excerpt)
- John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (Staff Pick, excerpt [pdf])
For more on the NBCC Awards and the finalists in the other categories, visit the NBCC.
