Book Critics Circle's finalists

[Dave Monroe]

Book Critics Circle's finalists

The national group of critics, editors and reviewers
nominates in six categories.
By Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic


Sorry, Thomas Pynchon (wherever you are). Maybe next
time, National Book Award-winner Richard Powers.

The National Book Critics Circle, the nationwide
organization of more than 500 book critics, editors
and reviewers, announced finalists in six categories
for its 2006 book awards this past weekend, and
neither highly honored novelist made the cut.

Among the fiction nominees are the Nigerian novelist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun
(Knopf), Man/Booker winner Kiran Desai for The
Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic), and Dave Eggers
for What Is the What (McSweeney's).

Veteran novelists Richard Ford (The Lay of the Land),
and Cormac McCarthy (The Road), both published by
Knopf, round out the fiction list.

Swarthmore graduate and longtime Philadelphia poet
Daisy Fried received her first NBCC nomination in
poetry for My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again
(University of Pittsburgh Press).

The other finalists are:

Nonfiction

Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance
in Iraq (Verso)

Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden
History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption
in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Penguin)

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural
History of Four Meals (Penguin)

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and
the American Revolution (Ecco)

Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the
Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Memoir/Autobiography

Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)

Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
(Delacorte)

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six
Million (HarperCollins)

Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux)

Poetry

Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory
(Margie/Intuit House)

Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelago
Books)

Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga: Poems (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux)

W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected
Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism

Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is
Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday)

Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting
Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a
Natural Phenomenon (Viking)

Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)

Lawrence Weschler, Everything That Rises: A Book of
Convergences (McSweeney's)

Biography

Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The
Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)

Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King
Years, 1965-1968 (Simon & Schuster)

Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)

Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of
Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin's Press)

Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man
Became History's Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

• 

The NBCC announced that this year's Ivan Sandrof
Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the
world of publishing and literature will go to John
Leonard, book critic, essayist, author and former
editor of the New York Times Book Review.

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
went to Steven G. Kellman, a professor of comparative
literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Finalists for the Balakian were Ron Charles, Kathryn
Harrison, Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Donna Rifkind.

The winners in the book categories will be announced
on March 8 at the NBCC's annual awards ceremony at New
School University in New York.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/books/16522012.htm


 
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