National Book Award Nominees Avoid the Predictable, Give Carey A Second Shot

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The National Book Foundation announced their award nominees this morning, with novelist Peter Carey getting another chance at honors after coming up short last night in his quest for a third Booker win. Coffee House Press and McPherson claim two of the fiction nominations, likely to fuel rights and/or paperback interest. (Yamashita's book is a paperback original; Gordon's book has not been published yet.)

Last year it was the bestselling books that won the two biggest categories, Colum McCann's LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN for fiction and T. J. Stiles' THE FIRST TYCOON: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt for nonfiction. But this year's entire fiction crop has recorded only very modest sales to date (with Krauss's novel, the biggest commercial prospect, just landing yesterday), and Patti Smith's book is the only nonfiction title to have hit bestseller lists and registered any sales of note so far. Both the fiction and nonfiction lists omit some of the season's most highly-touted titles (think Franzen, Roth again, Wilkerson, Chernow, Schiff, Mukherjee and others). But gender-watchers will be cheered by the wealth of female candidates.

Fiction

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)
Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Lionel Shriver, So Much for That (Harper)
Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

Nonfiction
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau)
John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco)
Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday)

Poetry
Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)
Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)
James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)
C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)
Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

Young People's Literature
Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown & Co.)
Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird (Philomel Books)
Laura McNeal, Dark Water (Alfred A. Knopf)
Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown (Amistad)
Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer (Amistad)

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