It’s award season, not just for movies, but for books as well. Yesterday, the National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists for the 2012 publishing year. Since 1976, the National Book Critics Circle has given the award in order “to promote the finest books and reviews published in English.” The American organization has selected thirty books eligible for a total of six prizes. Those six categories are autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Two of the titles in contention have already received much critical and popular acclaim, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.
and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Other Fiction Finalists:
Laurent Binet’s HHhH, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich
Zadie Smith’s London-set NW
Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, a frightening look into Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. (Both Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Binet’s HHhH are first novels.)
Biographies
Robert A. Caro’s The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Tom Reiss’s The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo , about General Dumas, father of the famous novelist
Lisa Cohen’s All We Know: Three Lives about early 20th-century trend setters Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland
Lisa Jarnot’s Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography
Autobiography
My Poets by Maureen N. McLane
Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton
The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande
In the House of the Interpreter by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid
Poetry
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry
Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys by D. A. Powell
Olives: Poems (Triquarterly) by A.E. Stallings
Non-fiction
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
For a complete list of finalists, click here.
The winners will be announced on Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 6:00 p.m.