National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Announced

The nominees for this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced. The awards for the best book published in five categories -- fiction, nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry, and criticism -- will be presented at a ceremony on February 26 at the New School in New York City. The winners will be chosen by the 22-member National Book Critics Circle board.

Three of the five nominees in the fiction category are Book Sense 76 picks: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is a top ten September/October Book Sense 76 pick; Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon is a September/October Book Sense 76 pick; and Atonement by Ian McEwan is a top ten March/April Book Sense 76 pick.

Here is the complete list of nominees:

FICTION

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese)
William Kennedy, Roscoe (Viking)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese)
Edith Templeton, The Darts of Cupid and Other Stories (Pantheon)

GENERAL NONFICTION

Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs)
William Langewiesche, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (FSG/North Point Press)
Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books)
Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (Viking)
Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Knopf)

BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II (Knopf)
Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)
Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (Viking)
Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press)
Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (Simon & Schuster)

POETRY

Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press)
B.H. Fairchild, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (W.W. Norton)
Harryette Mullen, Sleeping With the Dictionary (University of California Press)
Sharon Olds, The Unswept Room (Knopf)
Adam Zagajewski, Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

CRITICISM

Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Julia Blackburn, Old Man Goya (Pantheon)
William H. Gass, Tests of Time (Knopf)
Christopher Ricks, Reviewery (Other Press/Handsel Books)
Charles Rosen, Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (Free Press)