National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Announced

On Monday, January 14, the National Book Critics Circle announced its award finalists in six categories — autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry — for titles published in 2012.

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Book Awards will be announced at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 28, at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City. A finalists’ reading will be held on February 27, also at 6:00 p.m.

This year’s finalists, chosen by working critics and book-review editors, are:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

• Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us, Atria Books
• Maureen N. McLane, My Poets, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies, Blue Rider Press
• NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter, Pantheon

BIOGRAPHY

• Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Alfred A. Knopf
• Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, A Liveright Book: W.W. Norton
• Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador From Venus: A Biography, University of California Press
• Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, Crown Publishers

CRITICISM

• Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture, New York Review Books
• Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, Wave Books
• Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Belknap Press: Harvard University Press
• Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Graywolf Press

FICTION

• Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor (Trans.) HHhH,  Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ecco
• Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son, Random House
• Lydia Millet, Magnificence, W.W. Norton
• Zadie Smith, NW, The Penguin Press

NONFICTION

• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Random House
• Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, The Penguin Press
• Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, A Liveright Book: W.W. Norton
• David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, W.W. Norton
• Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Scribner

POETRY

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press
• Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, Copper Canyon Press
• Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts, McSweeney’s Books
• D.A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, Graywolf Press
• A. E. Stallings. Olives, Triquarterly: Northwestern University Press

Also announced on Monday were this year’s recipients of the Nona A. Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: William Deresiewicz; and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.