2007 National Book Awards

THE FINALISTS for the 2007 National Book Awards have been announced. Columnist and commentator Christopher Hitchens’s anti-religious polemic God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hatchet, 2007) has been shortlisted. So has Edwidge Danticat’s memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) and Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). There are also two first novels, Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company, 2007), and two collections of short stories, Lydia Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). The last time a collection of stories won the National Book Award was in 1996 when Andrea Barrett won it for Ship Fever (1995). And there is of course Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Denis Johnson.

Fiction
1. Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Mischa Berlinski
2. Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Lydia Davis
3. Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company) / Joshua Ferris
4. Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Denis Johnson
5. Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf) / Jim Shepard

Nonfiction
1. Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf) / Edwidge Danticat
2. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette) / Christopher Hitchens
3. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) / Woody Holton
4. Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf) / Arnold Rampersad
5. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday) / Tim Weiner

Poetry
1. Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company) / Linda Gregerson
2. Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins) / Robert Haas
3. The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press) / David Kirby
4. Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company) / Stanley Plumly
5. Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Company) / Ellen Bryant Voigt

Young People’s Literature
1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown & Company) / Sherman Alexie
2. Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books) / Kathleen Duey
3. Touching Snow (Atheneum Books) / M. Sindy Felin
4. The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press) / Brian Selznick
5. Story of a Girl (Little, Brown & Company) / Sara Zarr

The winners will be announced on November 14, 2007, in New York