Tomorrow they announce the Nobel Prize for Literature (I am keeping my fingers crossed for Danielle Steele. It’s her year!) and today the National Book Award announced their finalists (the winner will be announced on November 16th). They are as follows:
Fiction

* The March by E.L. Doctorow (Random House)
* Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon)
* Trance by Christopher Sorrentino (FSG)
* Holy Skirts by Rene Steinke (William Morrow)
* Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (Viking)

Nonfiction

* Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan
Burdick (FSG)
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius by Leo Damrosch
(Houghton Mifflin)
* The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf)
* 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside
the Twin Towers by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn (Times
Books)
* Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry

* Where Shall I Wander by John Ashbery (Ecco)
* Star Dust: Poems by Frank Bidart (FSG)
* Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 by Brendan
Galvin (Louisiana State University Press)
* Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin (Copper
Canyon)
* The Moment’s Equation by Vern Rutsala (Ashland Poetry
Press)

Young People’s Literature

* The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall (Knopf)
* Where I Want to Be by Adele Griffin (Putnam)
* Inexcusable by Chris Lynch (Atheneum)
* Autobiography of My Dead Brother by Walter Dean Myers
(HarperTempest)
* Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles (Harcourt)

The Quills were announced last night, but I am not bothering with them. Look here for the winners.