NBCC Awards

The National Book Critics Circle announced the 2007 Award Finalists on January 12th and the winners will be announced on March 6th. In case you’re wondering, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of nearly 700 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns.

You might want to see how many of the finalists you’ve read or which ones you want to put on your reading list. So here’s the list:

Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, Harper Collins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men, Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter, Harper Collins
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, S&S

Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Farrar, Straus
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America
1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical
Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's

Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its
Disaster Zone, Free Press
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying, Knopf
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982, Ecco
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso
Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life,
Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia, Random House

Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa's Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press

Criticism
Acocella, Joan, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon
Alvarez, Julia, Once Upon a Quniceanera, Viking
Faludi, Susan, The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt
Ratliff, Ben, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus
Ross, Alex, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus

Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago