This year's twenty finalists for the 2012 National Book Awards include five first-time authors' works,  two memoirs, and a collection of short-stories. 

Fiction 

Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead)

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney’s)

Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper)

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown)

Nonfiction

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday)

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf)

Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press)

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Poetry

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)

Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies (Southern Illinois University Press)

Tim Seibles, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press)

Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Susan Wheeler, Meme (University of Iowa Press)

Young People’s Literature

William Alexander, Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry Books)

Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach (Simon Pulse)

Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray)

Eliot Schrefer, Endangered (Scholastic)

Steve Sheinkin; Bomb: The Race to Build―and Steal―the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (Roaring Brook/Flash Point)

The awards will be presented on November 14, 2012.