The Happy Booker: awards

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The National Book Critic Circle Award finalists were announced this week. Sarah gives us the party scoop over at Galley Cat and includes a candid photo — Amy Bloom has never looked better, in our humble opinion. The NBCCA winners will be announced March 8, 2007. Anyone placing bets?

At the announcement luncheon, the NBCCA Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was awarded to Steven G. Kellman. The award was presented by friend of the blog and former Balakian honoree Scott McLemee (read more on the event here).

National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists:

Nonfiction

* Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
* Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade
* Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
* Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
* Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East

Fiction

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
* Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
* Dave Eggers, What is the What
* Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
* Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Memoir/Autobiography

* Donald Antrim, The Afterlife
* Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
* Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
* Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
* Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise

Poetry

* Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again.
* Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory.
* Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971)
* Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga
* W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

Biography

* Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
* Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968
* Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography
* Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
* Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler

Winners were announced Friday for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Marilynne Robinson walked away with the fiction prize for Gilead, her first book in twenty-three years, about a dying septuagenarian preacher writing to the 7-year old son he barely got to know. Fiction finalists included Philip Roth, a former NBCC winner nominated for "The Plot Against America," his dsytopian novel of the United States under a presidency of Charles Lindbergh. Other nominees were Edwidge Danticat's "The Dew Breaker" and two British releases, Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning "The Line of Beauty" and David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," a Booker finalist.

Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Vol. 1 got passed over in favor of "De Kooning: An American Master," by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. But the musical theme was revisited in the criticism category, with Patrick Neate winning for "Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet." Besides Dylan's work, Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (Penguin); Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton); and John Guy's Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Houghton Mifflin) were nominated for biography/autobiography.

That old time religion was a hot topic, not only for Robinson's fiction, but for Diarmaid MacCulloch's "The Reformation: A History" which won for general nonfiction. General nonfiction nominees: Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Holt); Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead); David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf); Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (Crown).

Poet Adrienne Rich, winner of the National Book Award and other honors, won for "The School Among the Ruins." Poetry nominees: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions); D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf); James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable Press); Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard).

Criticism: Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (Norton); Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint); James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

A lifetime achievement award was given to Louis D. Rubin, Jr., author and founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a North Carolina-based publisher.
David Orr, whose poetry reviews have appeared in The New York Times and Poetry magazine, received an honorary prize for criticism.

While the NBCC award brings a nice bit of prestige, and hopefully increased sales, there is no cash award.

Please Note: For those who haven’t placed their bets on the PEN/Faulkner award night, the odds just changed, tilting slightly in Ms. Robinson’s favor (with apologies to Ha Jin).