2012 National Book Critics Circle Finalists Announced

The National Book Critics Circle announced finalists in six categories. The Nona A. Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was awarded to William Deresiewicz (and, for the first time, the citation comes with $1,000 in cash thanks to a "generous donation" by board member Gregg Barrios) while Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar will receive the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award for their "pioneering work in feminist thought." The winners will be announced on February 28 at the New School.

The full list of nominees:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us (Atria)
Maureen N. McLane, My Poets (FSG)
Anthony Shadid, House of Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, In the House of the Interpreter (Pantheon)

BIOGRAPHY
Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)
Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (FSG)
Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (Liveright)
Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus (University of California Press)
Tom Reiss, The Black Count (Crown)

CRITICISM
Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (FSG)
Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books)
Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books)
Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Belknap Press)
Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press)

NONFICTION
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random House)
Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (Penguin Press)
Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? (Norton)
David Quammen, Spillover (Norton)
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree (Scribner)

POETRY
David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press)
Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books)
D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press)
A. E. Stallings, Olives (Triquarterly: Northwestern University Press)

FICTION
Laurent Binet, HHhH. tr. by Sam Taylor (FSG)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)
Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son (Random House)
Lydia Millet, Magnificence (Norton)
Zadie Smith, NW (Penguin Press)