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
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Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us, Atria Books
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Maureen N. McLane, My Poets, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies, Blue Rider Press
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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter, Pantheon
BIOGRAPHY
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Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Alfred A. Knopf
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Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, A Liveright Book: W.W. Norton
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Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador From Venus: A Biography, University of California Press
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Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, Crown Publishers
CRITICISM
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Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture, New York Review Books
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Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey, Wave Books
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Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Belknap Press: Harvard University Press
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Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Graywolf Press
FICTION
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Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor (Trans.) HHhH, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ecco
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Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son, Random House
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Lydia Millet, Magnificence, W.W. Norton
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Zadie Smith, NW, The Penguin Press
NONFICTION
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Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Random House
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Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, The Penguin Press
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Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, A Liveright Book: W.W. Norton
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David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, W.W. Norton
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Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Scribner
POETRY
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David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press
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Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, Copper Canyon Press
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Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts, McSweeney’s Books
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D.A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, Graywolf Press
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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.
