News in the Lit World

The 2011 National Book Award finalists have been released. Adult nominees are: Fiction: Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press); Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife (Random House); Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf); Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books); Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA). Nonfiction: Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf Press); Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown and Company); Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton & Company); Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking Press); Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books). Poetry: Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press); Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Carl Phillips, Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton & Company); Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press). Winners will be announced November 16.