The 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
[Read the NBCC liveblogging this event here.]
National Book Critics Circle Announces Awards Finalists
January 12, 2008
For Immediate release
In keeping with its goal to represent book culture throughout the nation, the National Book Critics Circle met in San Francisco today to choose the finalists for its annual awards. One author received nominations in two categories. Joyce Carol Oates got the nod in fiction for The Gravedigger’s Daughter and in autobiography for The Journals. Other fiction finalists reflected the theme of national inclusiveness, with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead), and Marianne Wiggins’s The Shadow Catcher (S., & S.), a meditation on the life of photographer Edward Curtis, famed for his images of Native Americans, that encompasses the final settling of the American West.
Poetry nods to the international scene include books by poet Tadeusz Rozewicz (New Poems, Archipelago), with other finalists including Mary Jo Bang (Elegy, Graywolf) and Michael O’Brien (Sleeping and Waking, Flood). In autobiography, a relatively new category for the NBCC, both Joshua Clark’s Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press) and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf) remind us of trouble close to home.
Biography focuses especially on authors (Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton, Knopf; Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison, Knopf; and Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press) Criticism ranged widely from Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt) to Ben Ratliff (Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus) to Julia Alvarez (Once Upon a Quinceañera, Viking).
The finalists were announced at a Saturday night event by a host of former NBCC winners and finalists, including Frederick Crews, Dave Eggers, Troy Jollimore, Jason Roberts, and Maxine Hong Kingston, at San Francisco’s famed City Lights Books (261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway). In addition, winners were announced for the NBCC’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, which went to Sam Anderson, and this year’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, who is Emilie Buchwald. Book award winners will be announced in New York City on Thursday, March 6, 2008, at the New School University’s Tishman Auditorium.
Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone, Free Press
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying, Knopf
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982, Ecco
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso
Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia, Random House
Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Hill & Wang
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s
Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men. Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter. Ecco
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, S. & S.
Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press
Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago
Criticism
Acocella, Joan. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon
Alvarez, Julia. Once Upon a Quniceanera, Viking
Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt
Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus
Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus
Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Sam Anderson -- winner
Finalists:
Brooke Allen
Ron Charles
Walter Kirn
Adam Kirsch
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Emilie Buchwald, writer, editor, and founding publisher of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis
Labels: 2007 Awards
posted by Critical Mass 9:30 PM
3 Comments:
I have a question for Mr. Freeman about Arnold Rampersad's NBCC Award-nominated biography of Ralph Ellison. In May of 1955, Archibald MacLeish announced that Ellison had won that year's Prix de Rome. [311] The Ellisons left for Italy on Sept. 22. [316]
"But he was heading to Italy, not Mississippi or Arkansas. He believed that isolation in Italy, rather than standing on the barricades, was more likely to produce a fine novel." [313]
Please remind me, where were those barricades again? The desegration of Little Rock Central HS began on Sept. 2, 1957. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, still two months away in Ala., began on Dec. 5 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.
The brutal Emmett Till murder had taken place on Aug. 28th, three weeks earlier. Is that what Mr. Rampersad would have had Ellison remain in the States to protest by "standing at the barricades"?
Weren't Richard Wright, James Baldwin, et al all living in Paris at the time?
Thanks, because I'd like to know if it would be politically correct for me to read Anthony Doerr's "Four Seasons in Rome," his memoir of a year as a fellow at the American Academy.
I am pleased to see Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Diaz as finalists, but I am hoping that Nathan Englander was also looked at for "The Ministry of Special Cases".
Edwidge Danticat is one of my favorite writers. May she grant us story after story for decades to come! How about an official website, Ms. Danticat, so that your reading fans can keep up with where you are speaking and/or signing.
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