The National Book Critics Circle named their nominees for awards in six categories, with the winners to be named on March 16. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing was given the John Leonard Prize for outstanding first book, and Michelle Dean is recipient of the organization’s annual citation for excellence in reviewing. Margaret Atwood was given their Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
True to quirky form, the organization’s fiction nominees overlooks on the year’s major works. Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad — which smashed all records in our “book of the year” aggregated lists — was this year’s NBCC big snub. But this is apparently part of their game; last year they ignored Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life; for 2014, Anthony Doerr’s book of the year All the Light We Cannot See was not seen by the critics; in 2013 they ignored co-book of the year Tenth of December by George Saunders (and in 2012 neither NBA winner The Round House by Louise Erdrich or book of the year Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel earned a nomination, and so on). Among this year’s nominees:
Fiction
Michael Chabon, Moonglow (Harper)
Louise Erdrich, LaRose (Harper)
Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown)
Ann Patchett, Commonwealth (Harper)
Zadie Smith, Swing Time (Penguin Press)
General Nonfiction
Matthew Desmond, Evicted (Crown)
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning (Nation Books)
Jane Mayer, Dark Money (Doubleday)
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Harvard University Press)
John Edgar Wideman, Writing to Save a Life (Scribner)
Autobiography
Marion Coutts, The Iceberg (Black Cat Press)
Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (Bloomsbury)
Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (Alfred A. Knopf)
Hisham Matar, The Return (Random House)
Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet (Metropolitan Books)
See the NBCC site for additional nominees in criticism, biography and poetry.