The National Book Critics Circle Award nominees have been announced. And, rather suspiciously, it resembles the National Book Award nominees. Will Vollmann garner another win? Or will it be Mary Gaitskill this time? Personally, I feel very sorry for all the non-Didion nominees in the autobiography section. Here’s the full slate:
FICTION:
- E.L. Doctorow, The March
- Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
- Andrea Levy, Small Island
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
- William T. Vollmann, Europe Central
NONFICTION:
- Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
- Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
- Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
- Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees
- Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War
BIOGRAPHY:
- Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
- Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life
- Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
- Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
- Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life
AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- Francine du Plessix Gray, Them: A Memoir of Parents
- Judith Moore, Fat Girl: A True Story
- Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
- Vikram Seth, Two Lives
CRITICISM:
- Hal Crowther, Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-millennial South
- Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders
- William Logan, The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin
- John Updike, Still Looking: Essays on American Art
- Eliot Weinberger, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles
POETRY:
- Simon Armitage, The Shout
- Manuel Blas de Luna, Bent to Earth
- Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
- Richard Siken, Crush
- Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
I don’t think that three out of five fiction nominees and ONE nonfiction book shifted over into the memoir category really constitutes resembling the NBA slate. None of the NBCC’s nonfiction titles were in the NBA shortlist; likewise, the NBCC’s poetry selection is entirely different.