National Book Award Finalists

Awards season is now in full swing. Last night from London came the news that Aravind Adiga had won the 2008 Booker Prize for his novel "The White Tiger." Today in the US the nominees for the National Book Award were announced. (The winners will be named on November 19.)

The nominees are as follows:

Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner) (Monitor review on 7/18/08)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) (Monitor review on 9/9/08)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Nonfiction
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf) (Monitor review 1/29/08)

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family  (W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Harcourt)

Poetry
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins) (Monitor review 4/15/08)

Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

Young People's Literature
Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum) (Monitor review 8/18/08)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)