On Wednesday morning the finalists were announced for the 65th annual National Book Awards, unveiled on NPR’s Morning Edition along with bookseller Mitchell Kaplan from Books & Books. In nonfiction, the most prominent (and commercial) longlisted author left behind was Walter Isaacson’s THE INNOVATORS, though the sole female candidate in that category, Roz Chast, did make it through as a finalist. Her graphic memoir is also the bestselling nonfiction nominee so far, by a wide margin. The winners will be named at the ceremony on the evening of November 19.
In commercial terms, Doerr’s novel has outsold the other four candidates in print many times over (and the book is splendid), though Robinson’s book was just published last week. She won the National Book Award in 2008 for HOME.
Fiction
Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press)
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner)
Phil Klay, Redeployment (The Penguin Press)
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (Knopf)
Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Nonfiction
Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury)
Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes (Metropolitan Books)
John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (Norton)
Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (Norton)
Young People’s Literature
Eliot Schrefer, Threatened (Scholastic Press)
Steve Sheinkin, The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights (Roaring Brook Press)
John Corey Whaley, Noggin (Atheneum)
Deborah Wiles, Revolution: The Sixties Trilogy, Book Two (Scholastic Press)
Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books)
Poetry
Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions)
Fanny Howe, Second Childhood (Graywolf Press)
Maureen N. McLane, This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)