The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2008 awards at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York City on Saturday night. The winners in each category—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, criticism, and biography—will be named on March 12 at an awards ceremony at the New School.
The finalists in poetry are:
August Kleinzahler for Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Juan Felipe Herrera for Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
Devin Johnston for Sources (Turtle Point Press)
Pierre Martory for The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press), translated by John Ashbery
Brenda Shaughnessy for Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)
The finalists in fiction are:
Roberto Bolaño for 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Marilynne Robinson for Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Aleksandar Hemon for The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
M. Glenn Talyor for The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kittredge (Random House)
The finalists in autobiography are:
Rick Bass for Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
Helene Cooper for The House on Sugar Beach (Simon & Schuster)
Honor Moore for The Bishop’s Daughter (Norton)
Andrew X. Pham for The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books)
Ariel Sabar for My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)
The nonprofit organization composed of seven hundred book critics and reviewers from across the country also announced on Saturday that the winner of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is the PEN American Center; Ron Charles will receive the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
Last year, Mary Jo Bang won the NBCC Award in poetry for Elegy (Graywolf), Junot Díaz won in fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead), and Edwidge Danticat won in autobiography for Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf).