Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards
The awards will be presented on March 12 at the New Schoolin a free ceremony that is open to the public. The full list of nomineesfollows:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
Blake Bailey, TheSplendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Roz Chast, Can’t WeTalk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury)
Lacy M. Johnson, TheOther Side (Tin House)
Gary Shteyngart, LittleFailure (Random House)
Meline Toumani, ThereWas and There Was Not (Metropolitan Books)
BIOGRAPHY:
Ezra Greenspan, WilliamWells Brown (W.W. Norton & Co.)
S.C. Gwynne, RebelYell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (Scribner)
John Lahr, TennesseeWilliams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Ian S. MacNiven, LiterchoorIs My Beat: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (Farrar,Straus & Giroux)
Miriam Pawel, TheCrusades of Cesar Chavez (Bloomsbury)
CRITICISM:
Eula Biss, OnImmunity: An Inoculation (Graywolf Press)
Vikram Chandra, GeekSublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen:An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
Lynne Tillman, WhatWould Lynne Tillman Do? (Red Lemonade)
Ellen Willis, TheEssential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University ofMinnesota Press)
FICTION:
Rabih Alameddine, AnUnnecessary Woman (Grove Press)
Marlon James, A BriefHistory of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books)
Lily King, Euphoria (AtlanticMonthly Press)
Chang-rae Lee, On Sucha Full Sea (Riverhead Books)
Marilynne Robinson, Lila(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
NONFICTION:
David Brion Davis, TheProblem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Alfred A. Knopf)
Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over aForbidden Book (Pantheon)
Elizabeth Kolbert, TheSixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt & Co.)
Thomas Piketty, Capitalin the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer(Belknap Press/Harvard University Press)
Hector Tobar, DeepDown Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and theMiracle that Set Them Free (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
POETRY:
Saeed Jones, Preludeto Bruise (Coffee House Press)
Willie Perdomo, TheEssential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Books)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen:An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
Christian Wiman, Oncein the West (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jake Adam York, Abide(Southern Illinois University Press)
NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING
Alexandra Schwartz
Finalists:
Charles Finch
B.K. Fischer
Benjamin Moser
Lisa Russ Spaar
IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Toni Morrison
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Phil Klay, Redeployment (Penguin Press)