2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards

THE FINALISTS for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award were announced in San Francisco on Saturday, January 12, 2008.

Fiction
1. Sacred Games (HarperCollins, 2007) / Vikram Chandra
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007) / Junot Díaz
3. In the Country of Men (The Dial Press, 2007) / Hisham Matar
4. The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco, 2007) / Joyce Carol Oates
5. The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster, 2007) / Marianne Wiggins

Nonfiction
1. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday, 2007) / Tim Weiner
2. American Transcendentalism: A History (Hill and Wang, 2007) / Philip F. Gura
3. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007) / Daniel Walker Howe
4. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday, 2007) / Harriet Washington
5. The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne, 2007) / Alan Weisman

Poetry
1. Elegy (Graywolf, 2007) / Mary Jo Bang
2. Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) / Matthea Harvey
3. Sleeping and Walking (Flood Editions, 2007) / Michael O’Brien
4. Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood Editions, 2007) / Tom Pickard
5. New Poems (trans. from the Polish by Bill Johnston) (Archipelago, 2007) / Tadeusz Rozewicz

Biography
1. Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press, 2007) / Tim Jeal
2. Edith Wharton (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) / Hermione Lee
3. Ralph Ellison (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) / Arnold Rampersad
4. The Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) / John Richardson
5. Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 2007) / Claire Tomalin

Autobiography
1. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982 (Ecco, 2007) / Joyce Carol Oates
2. Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (The Free Press, 2007) / Joshua Clark
3. Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) / Edwidge Danticat
4. Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso, 2007) / Sara Paretsky
5. Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia (trans. from the Russian by Arch Tait) (Random House, 2007) / Anna Politkovskaya

Criticism
1. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Pantheon, 2007) / Joan Acocella
2. Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA (Viking, 2007) / Julia Alvarez
3. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan, 2007) / Susan Faludi
4. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) / Ben Ratliff
5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) / Alex Ross

Winners of the 34th annual National Book Critics Circle Award will be announced in New York on March 6, 2008