NBA Finalists Announced at City Lights

by Bridget Kinsella, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 10/11/2006

Sir Francis Drake may have missed the Golden Gate in the fog, Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, but having the National Book Awards finalists announced for the first time on the West Coast at City Lights Books “was like we’ve been discovered at last.”

Before announcing the finalists, City Lights’ Paul Yamazaki said the day was even more historic because, “I’ve never seen so many writers congregated at this time of the morning without staying up all night the night before.” Then he announced the finalists.

In fiction the nominees are Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon); Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins); Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster); and Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins).

The nonfiction nominess are Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf); Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great

American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin); Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present (HarperCollins); and Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf).

The poetry selections are Louise Glück, Averno (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); H.L. Hix, Chromatic (Etruscan Press); Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press); Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New Directions); and James McMichael, Capacity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

The nominess in young people's literature are M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1:The Pox Party (Candlewick Press); Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death (Front Street Books/Boyds Mills Press); Patricia McCormick, Sold (Hyperion Books for Children); Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial/Penguin); and Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second/Holtzbrinck).

About 60 people from the Bay Area’s literary and publishing community turned out at City Lights for the announcement—including 45 writers. Faces in the crowd included: Avalon CEO Charlie Winton, David Ulin from the Los Angeles Times, Oscar Villalon of the San Francisco Chronicle and authors Anne Lamott, Barry Gifford, Ishmel Reed, Tess Uriza Hothle and Peter Plate.

One finalist, Jess Walter, was able to attend the event because he just happened to be on book tour in the area. He lives in Spokane. “At first I thought it was one of my practical joker friends,” Walter told PW Daily, referring to when he got the call the day before from NBA executive director Harold Augenbraum. “It’s a great thrill and more than a little surprise. You finish a novel and you feel like it’s come together, but to have other writers see it. That’s remarkable, really.” Winners will be announced November 15 at an awards dinner in New York.