National Book Award Finalists Announced

On Wednesday, October 15, author Scott Turow announced the 20 finalists for the 2008 National Book Awards from the stage of the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.

This year's finalists are:

Fiction

• Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
• Rachel Kushner, Telex From Cuba (Scribner), a July 2008 Indie Next List Great Read
• Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
• Marilynne Robinson, Home (FSG), a September 2008 Indie Next List Great Read
• Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Nonfiction

• Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
• Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
• Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
• Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Harcourt)

Poetry

• Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (FSG)
• Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
• Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
• Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
• Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

Young People's Literature

• Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
• Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum), a Summer 2008 Book Sense Children's Pick
• Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
• E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
• Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Knopf)

The winners will be announced at the 59th National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony, emceed by writer and actor Eric Bogosian, at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 19. Each winner will receive $10,000 plus a bronze statue; each finalist receives a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award.

This year's ceremony will also feature the presentation of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Maxine Hong Kingston, and Barney Rosset will be honored with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

"One interesting aspect of this year's finalists is the range of experience," said Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, "from first books by young writers to well-known and highly respected authors who have been writing and publishing for decades. And several finalists' books come from small presses."

In addition to the invitation-only gala awards ceremony, National Book Awards Week includes: 5 Under 35, NBF's evening of emerging fiction writers, on November 17; The National Book Awards Teen Press Conference, featuring all of the finalists in the Young People's Literature Category on the morning of November 18 at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the finalists reading at The New School on the evening of November 18.