Meet Your National Book Awards Shortlist

By Neal 

  • Fiction
    • Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (FSG)
    • Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (FSG)
    • Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown)
    • Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (FSG)
    • Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Knopf)
  • Nonfiction
    • Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
    • Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (Twelve)
    • Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/FSG)
    • Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf)
    • Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

DISCUSS: How’s it going to go down come November?

  • Poetry
    • Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin)
    • Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
    • David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
    • Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton)
    • Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton)
  • Young People’s Literature
    • Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown)
    • Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum)
    • M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum)
    • Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic)
    • Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown)

I want to know what you think: who’s going to win, who’s missing, etc. etc.