NBCC finalists announced

I've been out of pocket for almost two weeks, so I was delighted to learn that the National Book Critics' Circle announced their list of finalists for the best books published in 2008. You can read more on the NBCC's blog. All of the fiction finalists are on my TBR list, as are Rick Bass and Andrew Pham.

Fiction Finalists
Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Farrar, Straus)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus)
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge (Random)

Poetry Finalists
August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss)
Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Finalists
Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan)
Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT)
Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday)
Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press)
Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)

Biography Finalists
Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad)
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century (Penguin Press)
Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf)

Autobiography Finalists
Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach (Simon and Schuster)
Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter (Norton)
Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books)
Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)

Nonfiction Finalists
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (Knopf)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday)
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (Atlantic)
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)

Balakian Finalists
Michael Antman
Kathryn Harrison
Laila Lalami
Todd Shy