NBCC List: Roth, Robinson and More

by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2005

Critics who carped about the obscurity of the National Book Award's fiction finalists this year should be pleased with the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards for 2004: some familiar names, among them Philip Roth and Marilynne Robinson.

The complete list for the March 18 awards:

FICTION
Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Knopf)
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Random House)
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin)

GENERAL NONFICTION
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Holt)
Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead)
Diarmaid McCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking)
David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf)
Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (Crown)

BIO/AUTOBIO
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press)
Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1 (Simon & Schuster)
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton)
John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Houghton Mifflin)
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf)

POETRY
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions)
D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf)
Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins (Norton)
James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable Press)
Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)

CRITICISM
Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965–2003 (FSG)
Patrick Neate, Where You're At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop World (Riverhead)
Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (Norton)
Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint)
James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (FSG)

Book Awards Smackdown

They're two of the biggest book prizes in the country. But how the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Awards come by their finalists is as different as, well, authors and critics. A look at a few:

NBA:

Publishers apply–and pay–to have their book considered

Five-person author panels nominate finalists and decide on winner

Potentially a more closed process

Fewer categories make award (arguably) more elite

NBCC:

Judges solicit books from publishers and decide whether to move them to the discussion pool

Committees of critics, sometimes numbering as many as 20, decide on shortlists. A 24-member board votes for winners

Potentially a more chaotic process

More categories make award more specific—and winning more likely