Tonight is the National Book Awards at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. GalleyCat will be covering the event live on our GalleyCat Twitter feed and on this blog. You can also watch a live webcast of the event at this link.
At the ceremony two years ago, this GalleyCat editor interviewed author Lauren Redniss, filmmaker and author Jon Waters, as well as author and former NBA judge Amanda Foreman, and they all gave advice for writers.
Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the National Book Awards finalists.
Fiction Finalists
Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA)
Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group USA)
George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House)
Nonfiction Finalists
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore
Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer
The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright
Young Adult Literature Finalists
Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp
Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck
Tom McNeal, Far Far Away
Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone
Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints
Poetry Finalists
Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf)
Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA)
Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press)
Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems (Graywolf Press)