Awards

And the Nominees Are…

By Neal 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they gave out Quills last night, and apparently Harry Potter and Jon Stewart are popular, who knew? Now let’s see the shortlists for the National Book Awards, announced earlier this afternoon. The full roster of nominees is after the jump; for now, I’ll only say that the fiction list doesn’t seem like it’s going to bend everybody—and by “everybody,” I mean “the arts desk of the New York Times“—out of shape the way last year’s did…oh, and you can catch two of this year’s nominees, Mary Gaitskill and Christopher Sorrentino, at the National Arts Club (just off Gramercy Park) tonight, reading from their books beginning at 7:00 p.m.


  • Fiction
    • E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House)
    • Mary Gaitskill, Veronica(Pantheon)
    • Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
    • René Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow)
    • William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking)

  • Nonfiction
    • Alan Burdick, Out of Eden:  An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
    • Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau:  Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin)
    • Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)
    • Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes:  The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books)
    • Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains:  Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)

  • Poetry
    • John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco)
    • Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
    • Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press)
    • W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
    • Vern Rutsala, The Moment’s Equation (Ashland Poetry Press)

  • Young People’s Literature
    • Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf)
    • Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam)
    • Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum)
    • Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest)
    • Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt)