Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Awards: NBCC Nominees Named; Edgar Nominations

Publishers Lunch

The National Book Critics Circle announced the nominees for their annual awards on Monday afternoon. The winners will be named March 17. As usual, the nominees overlap in many planes with our aggregated list of the Absolutely Best of the Best Books of 2015 -- which means the biggest surprise is that Booker- and NBA-candidate Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is not up for the NBCC fiction award. The complete nominees are:

Fiction
The Sellout, by Paul Beatty (FSG)
Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House)
The Tsar of Love and Techno, by Anthony Marra (Hogarth)
Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction
SPQR: A History of Rome, by Mary Beard (Liveright)
Give Us the Ballot, by Ari Berman (FSG)
Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau)
Dreamland, by Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury)
What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, by Brian Seibert (FSG)

Autobiography
The Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander (Grand Central)
The Odd Woman and the City, by Vivian Gornick (FSG)
Bettyville, by George Hodgman (Viking)
Negroland, by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon)
H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald (Grove)

Biography
Fortune's Fool, by Terry Alford (Oxford)
Romantic Outlaws, by Charlotte Gordon (Random House)
Custer's Trials, by T.J. Stiles (Knopf)
Stalin's Daughter., by Rosemary Sullivan (Harper)
Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives, by Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch (Liveright)

Criticism
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)
Eternity's Sunrise, by Leo Damrosch (Yale)
The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf)
On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín (Princeton)
The Nearest Thing to Life, by James Wood (Brandeis)

Poetry
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, by Ross Gay (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press)
How to Be Drawn, by Terrance Hayes (Penguin)
Bright Dead Things, by Ada Limón (Milkweed)
Parallax: and Selected Poems, by Sinéad Morrissey (FSG)
What About This: Collected Poems, by Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon)

The NBCC also named a few award winners:

John Leonard First Book Prize
Night at the Fiestas, by Kirstin Valdez Quade (Norton)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Carlos Lozada

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Wendell Berry

Separately, the Edgar Award nominees were announced Tuesday morning. Best Novel nominees included The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter (Putnam), The Lady From Zagreb by Philip Kerr (Putnam), Life or Death by Michael Robotham (Mulholland), Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy (Dutton), Canary by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland), and Night Life by David C. Taylor (Forge). Also of note is Shirley Jackson's posthumous short story nomination for "Family Treasures" (which appeared in Let Me Tell You, published fifty years after her death.) The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on April 28. 

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