The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2008 awards at a well-attended event at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York City Saturday night. Here is the complete list of finalists in each category:

FictionRoberto Bolaño, 2666, FSG
Marilynne Robinson, Home, FSG
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, RiverheadM. Glenn Talyor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, West Virginia University PressElizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, Random House
Poetry
August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, FSGJuan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light, University of Arizona PressDevin Johnston, Sources, Turtle Point Press
Pierre Martory, trans. by John Ashbery, The Landscapist, Sheep Meadow PressBrenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon PressCriticismRichard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, Metropolitan BooksVivian Gornick, The Men in My Life, Boston Review/MIT
Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds, DoubledayReginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, University of Michigan PressSeth Lerer, Children's Literature: A Reader's History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, University of Chicago Press
BiographyPaula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, Amistad
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century, Penguin Press
Patrick. French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, Knopf
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, Norton
Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Knopf

AutobiographyRick Bass, Why I Came West, Houghton Mifflin
Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach, Simon and Schuster
Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter, W.W. NortonAndrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven, Harmony Books
Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, AlgonquinNonfiction
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War, KnopfDrew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, Knopf
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, Doubleday
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower:U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, Oxford University Press

Lifetime Achievement Award

PEN American Center

Nona Balakian Citation

Ron Charles