Yesterday afternoon the National Book Foundation announced the contenders for the National Book Awards, among them several titles published by small publishing outfits such as Coffee House Press, Four Way Books, and Copper Canyon Press.
The lists of honorees in poetry and fiction are below; the finalists in young people's literature and nonfiction (a category that includes rocker-poet Patti Smith for her memoir Just Kids) are posted on the NBF Web site.
The finalists in poetry, judged by Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady, Linda Gregerson, Jeffrey McDaniel, Brenda Shaughnessy are:
The Eternal City (Princeton University Press) by Kathleen Graber
Lighthead (Viking Penguin) by Terrance Hayes
By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press) by James Richardson
One with Others (Copper Canyon Press) by C. D. Wright
Ignatz (Four Way Books) by Monica Youn
The finalists in fiction, judged by Andrei Codrescu, Samuel R. Delany, Sabina Murray, Joanna Scott, Carolyn See are:
Parrot and Olivier in America (Knopf) by Peter Carey
Lord of Misrule (McPherson) by Jaimy Gordon
Great House (Norton) by Nicole Krauss
So Much for That (Harper) by Lionel Shriver
I Hotel (Coffee House Press) by Karen Tei Yamashita
The National Book Award winners, who will be named on November 17, will each be awarded ten thousand dollars. Runners-up will receive one thousand dollars apiece.
Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north have made public the shortlists for their own national book prize, the Governor General's Literary Award to recognize Canadian literature in English and French. Among the English-language finalists are poet Daryl Hine (&: A Serial Poem, Fitzhenry and Whiteside), former editor of Poetry magazine; fiction writer and Booker Prize finalist Emma Donoghue (Room, HarperCollins); and memoirist Ian Brown (Boy in the Moon, Random House Canada), who received the Trillium Book Award, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction, and British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Nonfiction this year.
The full lists, including the honorees in French-to-English translation, are posted on the award Web site. The winners, who will be revealed on November 16 in Montreal, will receive twenty-five thousand Canadian dollars (worth roughly the same amount in U.S. currency).