National Book Award Nominees

From a record 1,074 entries, 20 titles were announced today as finalists for the National Book Awards. The winners in each of the four categories will receive $10,000 at a black-tie ceremony hosted by Garrison Keillor in New York on Nov. 17. To be eligible, a book must have been published in the United States between Dec. 1, 2003 and Nov. 30, 2004 and must have been written by a US citizen. The finalists were selected by four panels of writers appointed by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting American literature.

The Monitor will review all the finalists over the next four weeks.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Madeleine is Sleeping (Harcourt)

Christine Schutt, Florida (TriQuarterly)

Joan Silber, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (W.W. Norton)

Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins)

Kate Walbert, Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Scribner)

Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt)

David Fischer, Washington's Crossing (Oxford University Press)

Jennifer Gonnerman, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton)

The 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report (W.W. Norton)

William Heyen, Shoah Train (Etruscan)

Donald Justice, Collected Poems (Knopf)

Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Cole Swensen, Goest (Alice James Books)

Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan University Press)

Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (Simon & Schuster)

Pete Hautman, Godless (Simon & Schuster)

Laban Carrick Hill, Harlem Stomp!: A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance (Little, Brown)

Shelia Moses, The Legend of Buddy Bush (Simon & Schuster)

Julie Anne Peters, Luna (Little, Brown)